What Making a Film About Iran Taught Me About Power

10 Nov 2026, 11:00 by Tanaz Eshaghian · TIME

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More than a decade ago, in Tehran, Tahereh Noori, a 35-year-old housewife, and her two teenage daughters killed her husband. They buried his body beneath the living room floor, under the coffee table. Tahereh had endured years of abuse, and all her attempts to obtain a divorce through Iran’s family courts had failed. The violence had become part of her children’s lives as well as her own. She felt there was no other way out.

When I first heard her story, I could not stop thinking about the distance between asking for a divorce and burying a husband beneath the floor. What had happened in those years? How had killing him come to seem like her only escape?

By the time my co-director, Farzad Jafari, and I began making An Eye for an Eye, a film about Taherah, she had spent 14 years in prison under the threat of execution. Under Iran’s system of qisas, her husband’s family could seek her execution or forgive her in exchange for diya, or blood money. Her temporary release on bail gave her a chance to participate in negotiations over her fate. Her children, now adults, were trying to raise the money that might save their mother’s life.

I had expected to make a film primarily about Tahereh and the tragic drama of her life: the violence she had endured, the legal system that had trapped her, and the possibility that she might be executed. Instead, making the film transformed my understanding of the strength of Iranian civil society.

Iranian lessons

During our research, we met activists who had devoted their time and attention to helping people facing the death penalty. This was how I got to know Farkhondeh Jabarzadegan, an anti-execution activist, and the women who volunteered alongside her. They were lawyers, social workers, activists, and ordinary citizens who had learned to navigate a legal system that families often struggled to contend with on their own. They did not work through a single organization or follow a formal plan. Much of their work was unpaid. Sometimes they simply knew whom to call.

At first, I thought of this as a practical response to a broken system. But the longer I watched, the clearer it became that I was seeing something more consequential. These women had built a kind of informal infrastructure of care. They knew which doors might open. They knew how to approach a grieving family. They knew when to argue and when to listen. They understood that telling grieving relatives they were wrong to stay angry would do little to persuade them to forgive a person who had killed someone they loved.

These women activists spent hours sitting with Tahereh’s husband’s relatives, asking them to reconsider. They would listen to anger without dismissing it. When the conversation turned to money, they tried to bring the amount of blood money demanded within reach of Tahereh’s family. Watching them, I became aware of how much skill it took to sustain what might look from the outside like an ordinary conversation. They were negotiating the terms of forgiveness with a family whose decision was bound up with grief, anger, faith, and money, and could determine whether Tahereh lived or died. And they were doing it without the power to compel anyone.

They also had to listen to Tahereh herself. After 14 years in prison, she was understandably angry and felt she had been punished enough. Her children were desperate to prevent her execution, whatever it took. Tahereh did not always agree with the people trying to help her. She often resisted their advice or became frustrated with the process. They were not helping an idealized or even always grateful victim. The volunteers kept working with her, responding to a complicated person in an impossible situation.

Navigating Tehran

In making this film, I expected to encounter the many restrictions that Iranian society and its religious legal system imposed on women. I expected to see how the law oppressed and failed them. What surprised me was how much influence women had learned to exercise within those constraints. That influence was rarely dramatic. Often it took the form of quiet persistence, whether that meant making another phone call, finding another intermediary, or sitting down with someone who had already said no.

Their work made me think differently about what civil society means in a country where formal institutions may not provide people with the protections they need. We often think of civil society in terms of organizations, institutions, and public movements. But it can also take less visible forms. It can grow out of knowledge passed from one person to another, relationships built over years, and a willingness to intervene in the life of someone who is neither a friend nor a relative. The women I met had developed precisely this kind of network.

Their work also challenged an assumption I had held about what it means to live under a restrictive system. It is easy, particularly from outside Iran, to imagine people living under such systems primarily as powerless. But power does not disappear simply because the state is powerful. Power moves into other places. People living under authoritarian governments can still exercise power and influence through relationships, knowledge, social networks, and persuasion.

The women helping Tahereh could not rewrite the law. They could not compel her husband’s family to forgive her. They could not undo the violence that had already taken place. But they could open up possibilities within a system that seemed to leave very few. And that changed the way I thought about Iran. Through Tahereh’s story, I learned that Iran is not simply a society oppressed by its laws. Iran is also a society full of people who had become extraordinarily adept at navigating the country’s legal and political system.

The ingenuity these Iranian activists had developed was itself, in part, a consequence of the failures of the institutions around them. I wish they did not have to spend their time persuading families to spare families facing executions. Their efforts cannot substitute for laws that protect women from violence or for a justice system that treats them fairly. But their work reveals something that is easy to miss when all we see of Iran is its government: the persistence of a socially and culturally engaged population that has not surrendered its capacity to act.

Tahereh’s story began with a failure of institutions. A woman tried to leave an abusive marriage and could not. The violence escalated. Eventually, she and her daughters killed the abuser they believed they could not escape. But the story did not end there. Around Tahereh were people who refused to accept that her fate was predetermined. They could not erase the killing. They could not make the system fair. They could not guarantee forgiveness. They could intervene and they did.