A War on Women

 At the heart of this film there is a door that will not let itself be crossed. It is the door of a hotel in northern Iran, the early 1980s. A man's hand pushes the girl back: your hair is showing, you are not "properly" dressed, you cannot come in. Her friends, all boys, walk through. She is left outside. That threshold is the smallest, almost domestic gesture of an immense apparatus: the political decision over who is worthy of appearing, who is authorised to desire, who may inhabit the common space. Raha Shirazi's A War on Women begins precisely there, from that gesture of the hand that draws a boundary, and turns that boundary into the key for reading half a century of Iranian history. 

The story A War on Women reconstructs is not the chronicle of a sudden uprising. It is the archaeology of a long, patient, systematic war waged by the only openly theocratic regime in the contemporary world against half of its own population. The film sets out from 1979 — the Islamic Revolution, the imposition of the compulsory veil for female public employees announced by Khomeini on the 8th of March, International Women's Day, in a historical irony so stark it seems deliberate — and from there it moves both backward and forward. Backward, because the history of the Iranian female body is a history of control that precedes the ayatollahs: as early as 1936 Reza Shah had imposed, by a decree at once opposite and symmetrical, compulsory unveiling, turning women's faces into the shop window of his own forced modernisation. Forward, because from 1983 — when the hijab became law for every public space — until September 2022, when the name of Mahsa Jina Amini once again set the country ablaze, the same body has continued to be the field upon which the State inscribes itself. 

Here the film touches a decisive knot, even though it never names it. In the span of a single century, Iranian women have crossed both faces of the same apparatus: first an authoritarian modernism that uncovered them by order, then a theocracy that covers them by order. The direction shifts, the grammar remains: the female body does not belong to the one who inhabits it, but to the State that reads it, classifies it, punishes it. It is in this sense that the misogyny Shirazi speaks of is not an attitude, a legacy, a backward custom — it is a form of government. It is biopolitics in its starkest sense: the production of authorised life and disauthorised life, the ordering of visible bodies and erased bodies. Women are not the symptom of the regime: they are its constitutive condition. Without their submission, the system does not stand. 

From here the film lets a first political-philosophical passage settle without imposing it: emancipation is not measured by the amount of cloth worn or removed. It is measured by the ownership of choice. Both the Shah and the Islamic Republic made the veil an interchangeable signifier of their own sovereignty, but in both cases women remained the object of the sentence, never its subject. Emancipatory regression — a concept central to reading the Iranian twentieth century and not only that — does not necessarily coincide with a return to the "traditional": it coincides with any project, modernist or theocratic, secular or religious, that claims to dispose of another's body in order to found its own order. It is a lesson that reaches beyond Iran. It applies to every latitude where reproductive rights are dismantled by judicial ruling, to every democracy in which legislation begins once again to speak over and against women. It stands as a warning about the reversibility of what we believed acquired. 

Seven women, four generations: activists, mothers, actresses, prisoners, exiles. Shirazi does not line them up as period witnesses, she holds them together as a single, stratified voice. The very structure of the film — built with co-author Samira Mohyeddin through encrypted communications, subtitles verified one by one, anonymity for those speaking from inside the country — is itself an exercise in existence. To exist, under a regime that has made the silencing of women its infrastructure, means first of all finding a way to speak without being recognised, to remember without being arrested, to show oneself without being seen. The documentary form thus mirrors its material: a resistance that proceeds in jolts, through gaps, along oblique passages, because frontality costs lives. 

There is a continuity the film brings to the surface and that overturns the most widespread journalistic account. Woman, Life, Freedom — the Kurdish slogan (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî) the world learned to pronounce in the autumn of 2022 — was not born with Mahsa Amini. Mahsa was the flame on a pool of petrol forty years in the making: the marches of the 8th of March 1979, the women pulling off the chador in public squares under the batons of the pasdaran, the mothers of Khavaran searching for their children in clandestine cemeteries, the prisoners of Evin, the actresses cast out of cinema, the students of Tehran in 2017 standing on the utility pylons of Revolution Avenue with their veils waved like flags. The 2022 uprising, which cost — according to independent monitoring — at least 520 lives and twenty thousand arrests in only a few months, is the point at which this long chain became visible to the world — not its origin. And this is the interpretive shift Shirazi advances with force: the present is not an explosion, it is a sedimentation.

What A War on Women analyses on the historical and statal plane finds in La Furia its tragic, biological scene. The one is the singular body that becomes ritual; the other is the collective ritual that becomes history. Both tell us we are standing before "violence as the originary form of the bond, not as an incident but as the subterranean structure of desire and power". 

On the existential plane, A War on Women is also a film about exile as a philosophical condition. In notes of a painful clarity, the director recounts a mother who lived the rest of her life far from Iran, ashes that could not return to the Caspian, the unease of a mother — now she herself — who wonders whether she will ever be able to bring her children to the country where her grandparents are buried. Exile here is not a biographical stage: it is a topology of being. It is the way history continues to live "inside" those who cannot return, the way the homeland becomes an inner chamber, a subcutaneous pressure, a grammar that speaks even when one is silent. 

In this sense, the women of the diaspora whom Shirazi summons before the camera are not guests of the film, they are its very principle. The film is structured as a dialogue among exiles who together watch the images coming from the country: not a we observing a them, but a we that recognises itself in the faces of others. One might say — with an echo of Adriana Cavarero — that it is reciprocal narration that here constitutes the political subject. The female word against theocracy is never pronounced in the singular; it takes form only in the passage from one voice to another, from one generation to the next, between those inside and those outside. 

There is, finally, a reason why this film cannot be sealed off as an Iranian question. It shows, with a clarity that disturbs, how the submission of women is the first investment of every authoritarian project. When a State wants to refound itself quickly, it is almost always from the female body that it begins again. It happened in Iran in '79; it is happening, in its Western and secularised versions, every time the discussion returns to whether women may dispose of their own gestation, their own identity, their own name. The difference of degree is enormous — and Shirazi does not flatten it — but the structure of the gesture is related. To hold this kinship together without confusing its registers is the political work the film asks of those who watch it. 

A War on Women does not close on a victory. It closes on a continuity: the same sentence Parvin used to speak in the demonstrations of 1980 and that the young women of Tehran sing today in the streets. It is not the story of an oppression, although it tells one without sparing the viewer; it is the portrait of a collective subjectivity that, from exile to exile, from prison to prison, from daughter to daughter, has refused to be described by others. It is — for those of us watching from here — an invitation not to mistake geographical distance for foreignness.