SEVEN WINTERS IN TEHRAN

Steffi Niederzoll / Germany, France / 2023 / 96 min / International Premiere

19-year-old Reyhaneh Jabbari is sentenced to death by the Iranian clerical regime for murdering the man who tried to rape her, in an urgent and heartbreaking film narrated by Cannes-winning actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi.

In Tehran in 2007, Reyhaneh Jabbari holds a business meeting with a new client. When he tries to rape her, she stabs him in self-defence and flees the scene. The same day, she is arrested and charged with murder. At her trial, she is sentenced to death, even though much evidence points to self-defence. The assailant had connections in the right places and the patriarchy holds sway over him, even after his death. Reyhaneh’s fate now lies in the hands of the dead man’s eldest son. Through personal footage, testimony, and her letters from prison, ‘Seven Winters in Tehran’ tells the story over several years of the trial and fate of a woman who has become a symbol of the resistance and women’s struggle in Iran that is now raging again – and now her mother has taken up the fight. Cannes-winning actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi (‘Holy Spider’) lends her voice to Reyhaneh Jabbari’s heartbreaking letters to her mother.