At Venice Film Festival, Celebrities Show Solidarity With Iranian Anti-Regime Protesters

Shiryn Ghermezian

Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera and jury members Jane Campion and Saleh Bakri take part in a flash mob in solidarity with the Iranian people at the 80th Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane

Actors, filmmakers, and other celebrities took to the red carpet at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on Saturday — but not to show off their outfits. Instead, they joined activists in demonstrating in support of ongoing anti-government protests that erupted across Iran last year and triggered a brutal crackdown by the regime.

Demonstrators, including festival director Alberto Barbera and several jury members, chanted “Free Iran” and “Women, Life, Freedom” — the latter of which has become the unofficial slogan for the protests in Iran. Protesters in Venice also held placards and banners showing the slogan’s Italian translation — “Donna, Vita, Libertà” — and “rise with the women of Iran.”

Other signs featured the image of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish women whose death almost a year ago while in the custody of Iran’s “Morality Police” sparked the protests in Iran. Amini was arrested and allegedly tortured by Iranian regime forces for wearing her hijab, or head covering, inappropriately.

At the Venice Film Festival, some posters held by demonstrators also included pictures of Iranian director Saeed Roustaee, who was sentenced to six months in prison in Iran for screening his family drama Leila’s Brothers at the Cannes Film Festival last year without government permission. One sign read, “Freedom of speech for Iranian artists now! Artists’ rights are human rights!”

The demonstration took place ahead of the festival’s screening of Maestro, a film about the late and renowned Jewish composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Others who participated in the protest included Saleh Bakri, a Palestinian actor and Venice Film Festival jury member, as well as jury president Damien Chazelle, Iranian actress and director Zar Amir Ebrahimi, and Israeli director Guy Nattiv.

Ebrahimi and Nattiv co-directed the film Tatami, which made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival earlier on Saturday. The movie — which tells the story of an Iranian female judoka ordered to fake an injury and withdraw from an international competition to avoid facing an Israeli opponent — is the first feature co-directed by an Israeli and an Iranian filmmaker. It received a standing ovation at its premiere.

During a scene in the film, the protagonist says, “I wore what they ordered me to; I repeated everything they told me. I am one of millions of people under the control of the Islamic regime of Iran. None of us matter to them. We are all tools.”