Ahangarani’s first feature is built around five portraits and five forms of resistance. Through personal archives, family Super 8 footage, protest videos, newspaper fragments, animations, and voice recordings, she retraces more than four decades of Iranian history, from the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution to cycles of strikes, demonstrations, repression, exile, and war. The film’s structure is episodic, almost like a family album that has been torn apart and reassembled under pressure. Each chapter carries its own texture, its own visual rhythm, its own wound.
But Rehearsals for a Revolution is not simply a chronicle of national upheaval. Its power lies in the way Ahangarani folds the intimate into the political. The life of a father, the memory of a teacher, the persistence of friends and artists, all become fragments of a larger Iranian story, one marked by rupture but also by an astonishing refusal to surrender. In this sense, the film is less a documentary about history than a documentary about endurance.
Ahangarani herself embodies part of that history. Sentenced to prison in Iran in 2013 and living as a refugee in the United Kingdom since 2022, she belongs to a generation of Iranian artists for whom cinema is not merely expression, but survival. Her film carries the force of testimony, yet it avoids the heaviness of didacticism. It is personal, poetic, and formally restless, a work that understands that oppression is not only recorded in headlines, but in silences, gestures, family memories, and broken conversations.
The title is crucial. Rehearsals for a Revolution suggests not failure, but preparation. It holds on to the idea that every act of protest, every artistic gesture, every refusal to disappear may be part of a longer choreography. The film looks back at decades of disappointment and repression, but it does not collapse into despair. Ahangarani’s Iran is wounded, yes, but never inert. Its people continue to improvise ways of being free.
That stubborn optimism is reflected in the film’s form. Inspired in part by the poetic freedom of Jonas Mekas, Ahangarani reconstructs memory as something alive and unstable. The result is a documentary that moves like a diary, a scrapbook, a political essay, and a whispered letter all at once. Its beauty does not soften the violence it depicts; rather, it gives shape to what violence tries to erase.
There is also a sense of inheritance running through the film. Ahangarani is not only asking what happened to Iran, but what must be carried forward, what stories must survive for the next generation, what images must be preserved before they vanish, what names must be spoken when official history refuses them. The film becomes a vessel for those who could not always speak freely, and for those who still cannot.
In a Cannes edition crowded with spectacle, Rehearsals for a Revolution stands out for its moral clarity and emotional precision. It is a film made from fragments, but it does not feel incomplete. On the contrary, its fractured form mirrors the experience of a people forced to gather themselves again and again.