4 days ago
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- Edinburgh Live
Director fled to Edinburgh after risking his life 'shooting films in secret'
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An Iranian film director who fled his home country after enduring prison torture has said he 'no longer felt human'.
Javad Daraei, 33, risked his life shooting films in secret that told of the persecution of women, the LGBT community and disabled community under the rule of the Islamic Public. In 2017, Javad was ambushed by three men who dragged him into a car and brought him to a detention centre after the release of his last film in Iran.
After human rights organisations provided a flight out of the country for him, Javad moved to Scotland after being offered an Artist Protection Fund Fellowship at Edinburgh University. While he's now safe, Javad says his mind easily wanders back to the tiny windowless cell where he was tortured by 'brutal' prison gaurds.
On the wall of his bedroom is a picture of a Highland landscape as a reminder when he wakes up that he is safe in Scotland. He said: "Sometimes I feel mentally frozen in that place though physically I am in Scotland. But being here is gradually helping me recover the part of me that I lost in that terrible place."
Javad's films are banned in his native homeland but have won 57 awards and 52 nominations in the UK, America, Australia, Europe and Asia. Two are now to have their Scottish premiere with a special screening in Edinburgh.
Javad is also now making his first feature in English in Scotland in a production written and directed by him about the precarious life of a sex worker in Glasgow. As he talks in his small flat in the city's east end Javad plays with his cat Fifi, steadying the nerves that always come when he recalls the terror he faced in Iran.
His first film, I Don't Like Here was made when he was a student at Tehran University and focused on the mistreatment of a trans boy. Those who transition in Iran are at risk of being disappeared or killed.
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He made the film after arriving in Tehran from his home in a religious mountain community in Khorramabad 100km east of the Iraqi border. He said: "When I went to Tehran, I met a community of gay and trans people. They lived with so much fear and it felt so wrong to me."
Homosexuality is illegal and punishable by imprisonment or flogging in Iran. In 2016 the film was smuggled out to festivals and led to Javad's first visit from the intelligence police who demanded to see the rushes but he had already stored the most incriminating shots in a hidden hard drive.
Javad said: "They weren't too bad that time. They warned me and I thought if that was the worst they would do then I would carry on."
I Don't Like Here will be shown at Edinburgh's Cameo cinema this month along with Limit, his second project which explores the torment of a man who is trapped by disability. The disabled in Iran are marginalised, excluded from society in a country where they can barely access healthcare or simple equipment like a wheelchair.
The movie was realised in 2017 and won him more international plaudits and many more gongs. Again he was warned by the intelligence police but Javad was determined to continue his underground filmmaking despite the risks.
His last film in Iran, Metamorphosis in the Slaughterhouse was screened at 17 international film festivals and won four awards in the US including best film and director. Focusing on the vigilante vengeance a young girl faces when her parents are accused of murder it was filmed in clandestine shoots in abandoned villages.
(Image: Ross Turpie - Daily Record)
The global recognition it received enraged the Iranian authorities. One day as he walked home Javad was ambushed by three men who thrust a hood over his head and dragged him into a car.
Javad said: "They pushed me to the floor of the car and they were punching me in the head and the neck. I was screaming begging to know who they were but they were just shouting insults at me. It was terrifying."
When the car stopped they dragged him into a detention centre where he was thrown into a room so small he couldn't stretch out. It had a piercing halogen light and there was a constant whirring of a fan. To this day Javad can't be in a room with a fan.
Javad could hear the wretched screams of other detainees ring out across the building. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is the brutal armed force which takes its orders from the Supreme Leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
They accused him of being an American spy. He remained hooded as the sadistic guards rained blow after blow on his body; they burned him with a lighter and they pounded him so violently they broke his leg.
He was held for 17 days and slept in a filthy mattress in the suffocating heat of the Iranian summer. Javad said: "Every day they got more and more brutal. I refused to eat. It was mental and physical torture. I no longer felt human. For the last few days I was unconscious."
Eventually he was released into a state run hospital where his leg was not properly treated and Javad knew if he was to survive he would have to escape Iran. The chance came when in 2021 when human rights organisations organised for him to be put on a flight out of the country.
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Javad ultimately moved to Scotland when he was offered an Artist Protection Fund Fellowship at Edinburgh University and he has been given the refugee status of the right to remain in the UK. As well as his film he is also writing an autobiographical play he hopes will open in London.
His experiences in Iran have left him traumatised but with the help of therapy and friends he has made in Scotland he is slowly recovering and has once again returned to filming. He has recently had surgery on the leg broken during torture. Javad finds solace in Scotland's cold and rain because warm days remind him of detention in Iran.
In Iran he is convinced that information about his filming was being fed back to the regime by one of his team and so it has taken him time to trust enough to form a small and precious crew around him to make his latest feature.
Javad said: "At first I still lived with the fear of being arrested again, of not being able to trust anyone. But I have the most wonderful crew who have shown me such patience and love.
"I am less pessimistic now. I believe the people you meet change your life and attitude and after experiencing such a terrible journey the people here in Scotland have really helped me. Before I wrote and made plays and films for the love of life but now it is the key to my sanity and survival."
Javad Daraei: Two Dead Films and One Still Alive shows as part of Refugee Festival Scotland at the Cameo, Edinburgh on June 18.
