In this interview Shiva Rahbaran talks about how the WLF uprising in Iran, triggered by the killing of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Islamic morality police, united the nation across all gender, religion and ethnicity divides and quickly shifted from a protest against compulsory hijab to the national revolution against the Islamic regime.
She explains that beside the relentless and brutal suppression and execution of the protesters by forces recruited not only in Iran, but also from the regime’s proxies in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the appeasement & containment policy of the West has rather helped prop up the regime.
She also talks at length about the role of art and of the artist in Iran today. Having talked to and written extensively about writers, poets and filmmakers in post-revolutionary Iran, she tries to shed some light on the grand challenge of being an artist in a totalitarian system, where the art that creates pockets of freedom is also abused and show-cased by the regime as a means for buying legitimacy on the national and international platforms.