Seven Winters in Tehran: dir Steffi Niederzoll (2023)

An important documentary: Reyhaneh Jabbari was a female student in Tehran who was hanged for murder, but she had acted in self-defence against a rapist. She would have received a pardon and a short jail term if she had retracted her testimony; she didn’t. Niederzoll has had access to personal and secretly recorded videos provided by Reyhaneh’s family,plus their testimonies and the letters written by Reyhaneh Jabbari in prison; the result is a powerful and poignant story of a woman who became a symbol of resistance and women’s rights in Iran and beyond. Farsi with English subtitles.

This film screens in the sixth edition of the Manarat’s CinemaMAS film festival, curated this time by filmmaker and visual artist Scandar Copti – head of the Film and New Media program at NYU Abu Dhabi from 2014 to 2017. Currently, he is still teaching filmmaking at NYUAD while working on an upcoming feature film.

Individual films on weekdays are AED 30 per head, weekends are AED 50 per day, and there’s an all-inclusive ticket at AED 150.