Farahnaz Sharifi was born in 1979, three weeks after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. She’s lived under dictatorship her entire life. Her brilliant documentary My Stolen Planet, premiering at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, documents the private and public rebellion over those decades. She edits together family photos, cell phone footage, pre-revolution TV, strangers’ 8mm films salvaged from the side of the road. All of it, filmed by different hands and existing in different states of degradation, comes together seamlessly and kaleidoscopically. She manages to tell her own personal story while including the voices of many others.
We see people living at a distance from their own selves: women forced to wear the hijab in public, 8mm birthday parties that were never intended to be seen beyond the families celebrating, Sharifi’s mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, an academic friend who fled Iran at 15 years old. We see many clips of people dancing, edited together back to back to sparse piano music, moving to music they’ve never heard. Another section shows women singers appearing on Iranian television in the 70s. They sway and sing with their hairstyles uncovered, but their voices are removed.
Sharifi begins with a photo of a massive demonstration of women against the initial hijab law. They are packed together on the street but their faces are clear and individual. Layering in her own childhood photos, she shows the disconnect between her happy smiling childhood at home and her first experiences of being forced to wear the hijab when she goes off to school. A photo of Sharifi arriving home from school, smiling with the hijab she just removed in her hand, will return throughout the movie. It’s the symbol of her secret planet away from the oppression of public life, the stolen planet of the title.
One constant in Shafiri’s life is her filming of everything. Recording distances her from her own life at times, like when she films a fire-jumping tradition instead of participating. She acknowledges the lack of consent in watching people’s private 8mm film reels found on the side of the road. The anonymous are woven into the film alongside the government murders of Neda Agha-Soltan and Masha Amini known around the world. We also see many unnamed people attacked by government forces for filming. They’re attacked for filming from the street, from their cars, even from the window of their own homes. One of her own moments of personal tragedy is recorded when she might have forgotten the camera was there. She shows us her weeping face inside the tiny bubble of yourself you get when you make a video call.
In one grimly comic scene, Shafiri films a clandestine house party interrupted by security forces. The hosts turn off the lights and ask the guests to be quiet while they try to pay them off. In the dark they try to scrounge up and quickly frame a photo of supreme leader Khamenei for the wall. Amidst all this found footage, people disconnected from their past lives, even the most powerful man in the country’s head floats on walls everywhere, disassociated from reality.
The film leads into covering the impact of COVID in Iran with a scene of Sharifi and her friends singing an accapella karaoke version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I’m not sure if this was a nod to Gal Gadot’s celebrity roundup version of ‘Imagine” which was met with near universal ridicule at the beginning of the pandemic. Gadot’s version was wealthy celebrities in mansions telling us the isolation will be okay. I can’t really put my finger on what the contrast between the two could mean. The film never stops exploring the push and pull between private and public life, between the intrusions into privacy and the desire to be seen by the world as we truly are.
Shafiri keeps building on the contradictions of this push and pull in increasingly dizzying ways. Until the intrusion on her secret planet becomes complete. Though devastating, she ends with a moment of hopeful resistance, and the fact that this film exists.
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