Sreemoyee Singh’s documentary film, And Towards Happy Alleys, is a lyrical tribute not only to Iranian New Wave Cinema but also to the intimate lives and struggles of the women in Iran, both in cinema and everyday life. With her female gaze pointed at prominent Iranian faces of cinema through her hand-held camera, Singh sears through gendered and politicised barriers in search of free speech and erotics of life while also battling the accidental and enforced censors of the Islamic Regime in Tehran.
Inspired by her introduction to the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and Mohammed Rasoulouf taught in her Film Studies course at Jadavpur University, Singh travels to Iran, and converses and sings, in Farsi to document the lives of the dissident voices under oppressive State. The Kolkata-born filmmaker’s vérité documentary, thus, becomes a litany of subversion and a flight towards freedom on the wings of poetry and cinema. In her documentary, cinema and life become intermingled and inseparable, as both search for threads of hope and sheer beauty interspersed amongst the Iranian landscape, culture and people.
When Forough Farrokhzad met Jafar Panahi
And Towards Happy Alleys opens with a lyrically shot montage depicting women gathered at the grave of twentieth-century Iranian feminist poet, Forough Farrokhzad. Singh directs her hand-held camera at the women lighting candles at Farrokhzad’s grave before briefly zooming in on author Jinous Nazokkar’s eyes, as Singh whispers in the background, “Your eyes are very beautiful.” Singh offers the women to gaze back at the camera which captures them. The Iranian women interviewed by Singh both come to question, challenge and contribute towards Singh’s understanding of Iran and Iranian feminism.
It is the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi, director of the acclaimed Offside (2006), Taxi (2015) and No Bears (2022), who drives Singh around Tehran as they discuss poetry, Iranian music and censorship enforced by a totalitarian regime. The rebellion encapsulated by Farrokhzad’s poetry, on one hand, and Panahi’s continual flouting of the ban imposed upon him on the other, seem to transcend barriers and coalesce together to form a unified statement of dissent against the Islamic Republic’s suppression of women’s bodies. While the thirty-two-year-old Farrokhzad died in a car crash, before the Islamic Rebellion, Panahi continues to challenge the theocentric regime through the poetics of his cinema.
Singh’s style of documentary and her erratic presence within her film are reminiscent of the French New Wave filmmaker and feminist, Agnes Varda’s semi-documentary films wherein Varda breaks the fourth wall to flit in and out of the lens to suspend all devices of illusion.
Singh’s documentary, the title of which is inspired by one of Farrokhzad’s poems, puts both Farrokhzad and Panahi in conversation with each other while the figure of Singh fleetingly slips in and out of the frame. Singh’s style of documentary and her erratic presence within her film are reminiscent of the French New Wave filmmaker and feminist, Agnes Varda’s semi-documentary films wherein Varda breaks the fourth wall to flit in and out of the lens to suspend all devices of illusion.
Singing in Iran, Singing of Iran in And Towards Happy Alleys
However, it is Singh’s melodic voice singing Iranian songs which fills in the tense and intimate moments in And Towards Happy Alleys. As the film progresses, Singh is continually asked by the people she meets, even Panahi, to sing Iranian songs. Singh carries her voice singing Sultane Gabha from India to Iran as if “to fill the absence of a feminine voice.” While women are prohibited from publicly singing in Iran, Singh’s lone voice resounding through the alleys of Tehran is a contradiction and a privilege that can only be afforded by her because of her status as an outsider. Even though the men celebrate the music that Singh brings to them, the irony of the lyrics which profess a woman’s love and erotic freedom is not lost upon the viewers.
Instead of critically approaching the totalitarianism of Iran, Singh offers their music back to them as a gesture of empathy, intersectionality and acknowledgement of shared struggles. In a subversive move reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht, And Towards Happy Alleys sings in and about our contemporary dark time.
Accidental censors and the search for Iranian women’s narratives
In Singh’s unfinished conversation with Mohammad Shirvani, the accidental censors of Tehran uncannily reveal themselves. The director of Navel (2004) and Fat Shaker (2013) is continually interrupted by drilling noises nearby whenever he initiates discussions on the absence of the uncovered feminine body in Iranian cinema or the eroticism of the hijab or the chador. Shirvani also reflects upon how the Ministry propagates the idea of self-censorship amongst Iranian women.
Singh soon encounters a billboard in Tehran which in bold letters declares the hijab as being synonymous with chastity and modesty. As she interviews other men, the hijab is revealed to be considered a symbol of self-censorship by them — an internalised dictum of modesty. Singh’s documentary battles this fractured biopolitics in Tehran and challenges this internalisation of hijab by the State by collecting narratives of women and activists who have been opposing the compulsory hijab mandate in Tehran.
Singh interviews human rights lawyer and feminist Nasrin Sotoudeh who was responsible for providing legal protection and assistance to imprisoned women in Iran who were arrested for flouting the strict decorum or removing their scarves. Sotoudeh, who had been continually challenging the stringent hijab enforced by the state despite being routinely arrested, recounts to Singh how she had initiated the protests against compulsory chador in prison. Soutoudeh shares the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought with Panahi and was sentenced to thirty-eight years and 148 lashes in prison in 2019, soon after conversing with Singh. Much like Panahi, Sotoudeh remains an internationally acclaimed dissident figure who continues to uphold the human rights claims of women severely compromised by the Islamic Regime.
Mahsa Amini and the 2022 Jin, Jiyan, Azaadi Movement in Iran
Singh’s documentary’s release in India, which travelled to over ten renowned film festivals worldwide, coincides with the “women, life, freedom” movement in Iran as the movement is reinvigorated again following the arrest of a student’s arrest from the prestigious Islamic Azad University in Tehran on 2nd November 2024. The woman’s act of stripping down to her undergarments is being hailed as a show of strength and courage against the stringent Islamic dress code. The unidentified woman, however, remains under the custody of the police and purportedly deployed to a psychiatric unit.
The unidentified woman’s arrest joins the list of unending brutal measures taken by the Iranian morality police to enforce compulsory hijab upon women. In her documentary, Singh visits the infamous enghelab (Persian for the Urdu word, Inquilaab) street in Tehran where she comes across a woman kicked off by a man for loudly protesting against the hijab.
Numerous incidents of resistance against the Islamic dress code abound which received worldwide attention after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed in 2022. Amini was arrested by the morality police for not having worn the hijab tightly. She died in custody after succumbing to police brutality. Her death sparked the Jin, Jiyan, Azaadi (women, life and freedom) movement in Iran and worldwide to oppose authoritarianism over women’s bodies.
With the recent arrest of the unidentified student, women in Iran now face the prospect of battling technological enforcement of compulsory hijab. The Hijab and Chastity Bill continues to threaten women’s freedom and movements by introducing strict penalties and is meant as a blow to the women, life and freedom movement. The prospect of employing AI-powered facial recognition technology to identify absconders is still under review. If passed, it could be a lethal blow to the movement and shall obfuscate the right to privacy, dissent and freedom of women living under the totalitarian regime.
In such times, Singh’s documentary, therefore, becomes a litany of survival and search for happy alleys amidst oppression. In an empathetic move, Singh confesses that the “alleys and women” of Tehran seem familiar to her, lending a sense of a “strange déjà vu” to her experiences and encounters in Iran. Her documentary recognises the tender thread of shared suffering that runs across feminist protests in both Iran and India.
The rise of a totalitarian force that threatens rights to freedom, speech, body and creativity is a force to contend with in Singh’s documentary whose focus on Iran becomes an unlikely yet empathetic commentary on women struggling under similar despotic forces in India and worldwide.
