Who is Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the Cannes-award-winning Nights of Mashhad actress?

Ali Abbasi's film can be viewed on Arte and free in replay.

The Nights of Mashhad, by Ali Abbasi (who has just released The Apprenticethe film with Sebastian Stan on the rise of Donald Trump) arrives this Monday on television, in the second half of the evening, as well as on Arte.TV. First advises you.

On May 29, 2022, Zar Amir Ebrahimi won the Best Actress Prize at the 75th Cannes Film Festival to a standing ovation from the Grand Théâtre Lumière. A very strong moment for the actress Nights of Mashhadwho remained on stage for many minutes, first speaking in Farsi, her mother tongue, to speak with emotion about the situation of women in Iran.

“I had a very long journey before arriving here on this stage“, she explains, after switching to English. “A journey marked by humiliations. But the cinema was there. It practically saved my life. The Nights of Mashhad is filled with hatred, hands, breasts, sex. Everything we can't show in Iran“. And Zar Amir Ebrahimi knows what she is talking about.

On stage, the 41-year-old actress knows she has come a long way. In her speech, she referred to her personal story. After becoming a local star with the series Nargesshe found herself at the heart of a scandal in 2008 when a sex tape featuring her with a former boyfriend found its way onto the internet. She faces prison and whippings, so she must lie to protect herself.

“As I said in my speech at Cannes, cinema saved me“, she confided to Madame Figaro. “I sincerely think so. I felt like I was playing a role, doubling myself. Surviving meant lying: to my interrogators, one of whom constantly harassed me, to the judge, to whom I denied having made this video. Meanwhile, I was conducting my own investigation: I wanted to know who had leaked these images.“

Ali Abbasi – Nights of Mashhad: “I am worried about my actors who still live in Iran”

Her career in Iran was over, and she took refuge in France in 2008, where she rebuilt herself and returned to acting. And his choices are not trivial. In 2017, she starred in Tehran Taboowhich deals directly with the question of sexual life thwarted by the religious prohibitions in force in Iran. And what about Nights of Mashhadfilmed in Jordan, where she plays a journalist investigating a serial killer who preys on prostitutes. A film that directly attacks the machismo of Iranian society.

“The Nights of Mashhad presents a distorted image of Iranian society and openly insults the transcendent beliefs of Shiites“, reacted the Cinematographic Organization of Iran, accusing Ali Abbasi's film of following “the same path taken by Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses“.

Nights of Mashhad: a film under high tension [critique]