Rehearsals for a Revolution

Through five portraits of relatives and mentors - five different forms of resistance - Iranian director Pegah Ahangarani traces the intimate history of her own life and, at the same time, that of her country.

Drawing on personal archives, home videos, photographs, street-protest footage, newspaper reports and oral testimonies, she revisits more than four decades of Iran’s turbulent history, from the revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War to the protests and upheavals of the present day. Each portrait becomes a rehearsal: an attempt to understand how political change, repression and resistance have shaped the lives of those closest to her.

Moving between the personal and the collective, Ahangarani pieces together memories that are at once intimate and national, revealing the ways history lives on within families and across generations.

Through these fragments, she asks what it means to inherit a revolution, to resist its aftermath, and to continue imagining a different future.

The repeat screening (Wed Nov 18) will be presented by UCC lecturer in Sociology Mastoureh Fathi.