Warless Day

Hamed Mohammadi captures the daily life of artist Solmaz Vakilpour, poised to launch a performing act in front of Köln’s station. Helped by her son, her partner and some activist friends, she does her best to delineate the contours of the pending action. It is then that a friend of hers, actress Moujan Mohammad Taher, calls on the phone: unable to cope with oppression any longer, literally desperate by conditions of life in Iran, Moujan wants to film herself naked in the streets of Teheran.
Echoing in some way the prevailing Iranian situation, Mohammadi’s camera is more often than not confined to the inside of a household. This is the locale for secrets, for unleashed discourse, as well as a place of boundless warmth. All witness Solmaz’s dilemma, who is torn between her desire to protest regardless of any moral order reaching above her and her actual responsibility: is she, as an activist, entitled to spur other women to put their lives in danger?
Every night on the phone, Solmaz tries to bring Moujan “back to reason”. For even if Warless Day is suffused with the swaying of spoken words that unveil a solidarity network, a network of love, one inevitably ends up colliding against words as soon as they express how huge the risk being run actually is. What can be the ultimate end to this except death or torture in Evin prison? And yet, still, at the end of an anguished insomnia, a new dawn is rising. And with it some good tidings. (V.P.)