There Is No Evil review – passionate plea against Iran’s soul-poisoning executions | Film | The Guardian

There Is No Evil review – passionate plea against Iran’s soul-poisoning executions | Film | The Guardian: 


There Is No Evil review – passionate plea against Iran’s soul-poisoning executions

Dissident Mohammad Rasoulof blasts against his country’s profligate use of capital punishment that includes making citizens carry out death sentences

Great technique in the storytelling … There Is No Evil.



Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1Tue 30 Nov 2021 21.00 AEDT


Maybe you don’t go to Iranian cinema for nail-biting action and suspense. But that’s what you are given in this arresting portmanteau film, the Golden Bear winner at last year’s Berlin film festival. It is written and directed by film-maker and democracy campaigner Mohammad Rasoulof, who has repeatedly been victimised by the Iranian government for his dissident “propaganda” – most recently, in 2020, with a one-year prison sentence and two-year ban on film-making. As with Rasoulof’s fellow Iranian director Jafar Panahi, a ban of this sort can be finessed, by playing on the government’s strange pedantry and hypocrisy. If the film is technically registered to someone else and shown outside Iran at international film festivals where its appearance boosts Iran’s cultural prestige, the authorities appear to let it slide, though persist with harassment.



There Is No Evil consists of four short stories – with twists and ingeniously concealed interconnections – on the topic of the death penalty and how it is poisoning the country’s soul. Hundreds of people are executed a year in Iran, including children. Execution of the condemned criminal is the job of civilian functionaries but also widely carried out by soldiers doing compulsory national service.



In the first section, entitled There Is No Evil, the secret horror of the death penalty is the unacknowledged elephant in the room. Heshmat (Ehsan Mirhosseini), is a dull salaryman, who is shown living his ordinary life after the working day is done: picking his daughter up from school, dealing with his mother-in-law, taking the family out for pizza. It all seems blameless and bland until the working life resumes the next day. 

The second part, entitled She Said: “You Can Do It”, is where we get the thriller-style tension. Pouya (Kaveh Ahangar) is a young national service conscript horrified at the realisation that he must kill a condemned man. It is his job to accompany the prisoner from the cell to the gallows where he must kick the stool away. Does he have the nerve to turn his own weapon on his fellow soldiers?

In the third, Birthday, Javad (Ahangar) is a national-service conscript taking advantage of the extra-long leave given to those who have done their execution duty, to travel to the country and propose to his girlfriend on her birthday, only to discover a hidden horror for which he is responsible. 

In the fourth section, Kiss Me, a musical cue discreetly hints at a relation with a story that has gone before: a middle-aged couple living in a remote, mountainous part of Iran play host to their sophisticated niece who has been living in Germany.

There is great technique in the storytelling, and Rasoulof’s outrage and nausea at the state-sanctioned murder gives the film passion.

There Is No Evil is in cinemas from 3 December.

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/05/there-is-no-evil-review-mohammad-rasoulof-golden-bear-iran-death-penalty-drama

There Is No Evil review – devastating everyday tales of life under Iran’s brutal regime

Mohammad Rasoulof’s Golden Bear winner examines the brutal impact of the death penalty and suppressed freedom on ordinary Iranians

There is No Evil.

Cumulative power… There is No Evil.

Wendy Ide

Sun 5 Dec 2021 23.30 AEDT

Four stories from contemporary Iran, all linked by the theme of capital punishment and suppression of freedoms, make up this Berlin Golden Bear-winning drama from Mohammad Rasoulof. It’s a typically forthright and powerful work from the director, who was sentenced to a year in prison in 2020 after three of his films were found to be “propaganda against the system”.

Rather than take as its subject the prisoners sentenced to death, the film instead explores the impact on those who must enact the order; who, one way or another, are left with their own life sentences. A father and husband goes about the banal business of family life, but the comfortable existence that his job buys for his wife and daughter leaves him with chinks of trauma that leak through on the drive to work in the small hours of the morning. A soldier finds himself unable to follow the order to execute and makes a decision to escape instead. An older man lives with the consequences of making that same choice. Bleakly matter-of-fact in approach, the film has a devastating cumulative power that grows with each story.

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This anthology film from director Mohammad Rasoulof explores the social consequences of Iran’s death penalty.

Unfolding across four divergent stories, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Golden Bear-winning anthology film There is No Evil presents a potent tapestry of perspectives informed by capital punishment in present-day Iran. Rather than being caught between poetry and censorship, Rasoulof strays from the stronghold of allegorical aesthetics and instead adopts a necessary and uncompromising antagonism against governmental oppression with fearless narrative urgency.

Each short is emotionally draining in its portrayal of the personal responsibility of executioners against a backdrop of authoritarian rule. Depictions of complex family dynamics, mandatory military conscription and corrupt state practices work in tandem to create a textured understanding of violence and its banality, of its immersion in the quotidian and the mundane.

The first two vignettes are captivating and thrilling, making the chest tighten with anxiety, while the didactic dialogue of the third and fourth shorts falter in focus and tonally complicate the whole. Despite an excessive 150-minute runtime, a fair share of abrupt tonal shifts and a somewhat heavy-handed execution of metaphors threatening to rob the anthology of power and cohesion, the dramatically consistent depictions of contempt, grief and rage bring an adequate sense of uniformity.

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https://m.khan.co.kr/opinion/column/article/202207300300025

김지연의 미술소환

사탄은 없다

2022.07.3003:00

김지연 전시기획자·광주비엔날레 전시부장

모함마드 라술로프, There is no evil, 2020 ⓒMohammad Rasoulof

모함마드 라술로프, There is no evil, 2020 ⓒMohammad Rasoulof

공공의 영역에서 이루어지는 선택과 결단이 공공의 이익에서 비껴가는 일은 무수히 많다. ‘공공’이라는 추상적인 대상을 규정하기 어려운 점도 원인이지만, 결정의 내막에 숨겨진 권력자의 이해관계가 공공의 이익이라는 명분을 기묘하게 비틀어 놓기 때문이다.

지난 5월 이란 남부 아바단의 ‘메트로폴 빌딩’이 붕괴하면서 43명이 사망했다. 시민들은 억압의 방식으로 비효율적인 통치를 이어가는 부패한 국가가 부실공사를 무책임하게 방치한 결과, 무고한 시민들이 사망했다는 현실에 분노하며 무능력한 이들의 기소를 요구했다. 결국 사법부는 아바단 전·현직 시장을 비롯하여 20명을 구속기소했지만, 그에 앞서 시위에 참여한 모하마드 라술로프, 무스타파 알레흐마드, 자파르 파나히 등 이란의 대표적인 예술가들을 ‘사회의 안전’을 해친 혐의로 체포했다.

이란의 폐쇄성과 예술가를 핍박하는 현실을 지속적으로 비판해 온 라술로프는 이란이 국가 권력을 작동시키는 방식을 사형집행관이 주인공으로 등장하는 작품 ‘사탄은 없다’를 통해 드러냈다. 인구수 대비 전 세계에서 가장 높은 사형 집행률을 보이는 이란은, 미성년자 사형은 말할 것도 없고, 명확한 규정과 체계 없이 이루어지는 부당한 판결을 근거로 공개적인 장소에서 사형을 집행하여 권력의 힘을 과시·강화한다는 비난을 받는다.

그는 행정당국이 생계·노동·생존과 사형을 결부시켜 국가의 존재를 이어나가는 현실, 그 권력의 민낯을 폭로했다. 사형집행자는 그의 의지와 무관하게 권력자의 지시를 따라야 하고 이를 어길 시 불이익을 받는다. 법의 테두리에서 죽고 죽이는 일은 온전히 피지배자들 사이에서 이루어지며, 이를 배후 조종하는 권력의 잔혹함은 영혼을 파괴하지만, 누구도 책임은 지지 않는다.