Born in Evin: In Praise of Life

Everything begins with a name: Evin. A prison in Tehran where political prisoners have long reported torture and abuse. This time, however, we are faced with a different story: the narrative of a young girl who grew up in Germany and struggles to speak Persian but discovers that she was born in Evin prison and now wants to find answers to her questions about this matter. "Born in Evin," directed by Maryam Zare, is a German production that had its world premiere on Saturday at the 69th Berlin Film Festival. Maryam Zare, who has worked as an actress in Germany, mocks the current situation in the acting profession in German television and cinema, where she is constantly asked to play the roles of veiled terrorists. This type of self-deprecating humor gives the film a witty and engaging atmosphere, despite the deep bitterness it contains, which can easily bring tears to the audience's eyes. The filmmaker chooses a classic documentary style to address the subject: her presence in front of the camera and her effort to find answers to questions that have seriously become her concern. With this film, which took three years to make, she tries to uncover untold parts of her life and share them with the audience. The issue of the 'mother' (a pregnant woman imprisoned for political activities in 1983 who has now become a successful woman in Germany, even a candidate for the mayor of Frankfurt) and her silence about this bitter memory becomes the driving force of the film. The mother, in order to protect her child and perhaps to escape from painful memories she does not want to explore, tries throughout the film to avoid recounting her story. Instead, her father, her mother's friends, and several human rights activists who meet her provide shocking information about the prison conditions at that time. The film could easily have turned into a tear-jerking melodrama or a political statement, but the filmmaker smartly navigates both pitfalls and manages to share her creator's world with the audience regarding an important aspect of her life. Zare sheds tears in various scenes of the film (just as she couldn't hold back her tears on stage after the film's screening in Berlin), but this crying is so real, bitter, and even pleasant for the audience that it becomes part of the film's structure. One of the most shocking scenes is when her mother's friend and fellow inmate tells her that when she returned to the cell after being born, all the inmates, numbering around forty to sixty, stood up and welcomed her with cheers and applause, so despite being born in prison, she was met with a beautiful reception. Zare's efforts to find others born in Evin prison are not very successful. Some of them are unwilling to think about this issue or appear in front of the camera. Near the end, she finds Sahar Dalijani on the other side of the world, who has had a similar fate and has explained it in a book. The two young girls meet; it seems as if they have known each other for years. The film finds its importance and value in narrating moments of life; it does not exaggerate and ultimately, despite the ongoing bitterness from four decades of violence, torture, and imprisonment, it is a celebration of life.