Film screening: There Is No Evil

Stanford Iranian Studies Program

October 29, 2021

Speaker: Mohammad Rasoulof

The film screening of There Is No Evil was followed by a discussion with the film's director, Mohammad Rasoulof. The talk is in Persian with live English translation.

About the film:

Filmed in secret and banned in its home country, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Golden Bear-winning film is an anthology of four short stories, each focused on a person affected by the capital punishment system in a country that commits more executions per capita than anywhere else on Earth.

About the director:

Mohammad Rasoulof was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1972. He is an independent director, writer, and producer. He studied sociology. Rasoulof started his filmmaking with documentaries and short films. For his first film Gagooman (The Twilight, 2002) Rasoulof won the prize for the best film at the Fajr Film Festival in Iran. After his second film Jazireh Ahani (Iron Island, 2005) he began to have problems with the censorship system in Iran and his possibilities for the further production and screening of films were strongly limited or prohibited. To this date Mohammad Rasoulof has produced five feature films which none of have been shown in Iran due to the censorship, while his films are enjoyed by a broad audience in cinemas and festivals outside of Iran. Until 2010 Rasoulof mostly used metaphoric forms of storytelling as his means of expression in his films. Since then, he has shifted to using more direct forms of expression. In March 2010 Rasoulof was arrested on set at a filming location together with Jafar Panahi while they were directing a film together. In the following trial, he was sentenced to six years in jail. This sentence was later reduced to one year. He was then released on bail and is still waiting for the sentence to be executed. Mohammad Rasoulof has won many prizes for his films. In 2011, he won the prize for best director in Un Certain Regard for his film Bé Omid é Didar (Goodbye, 2011) at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2013 he won the FIPRESCI Prize in Cannes for the film Dast-Neveshteha-Nemisoozand (Manuscripts Don't Burn, 2013) from the International Federation of Film Critics in Un Certain Regard. In 2017 he won the best film Prize in Cannes for the film Lerd (A Man of Integrity, 2017) in Un Certain Regard. He won the prize Golden Bear for the film Sheytan Vojood Nadarad (There Is No Evil, 2020) at the Berlin Film Festival 2020.