‘Roya’ Berlinale Review: Prison, Trauma, and Survival in Contemporary Iran

The experience of being held in what is known as solitary confinement can be brutal and deeply disorienting. That, above all, is what this impressionistic Iranian film tries to convey. Centered on an Iranian woman named Roya, who endures such a situation, the film asks the viewer to reconstruct—or imagine—the sequence of events, since nothing is entirely linear or realistic. Past, present, and future seem to bleed into one another constantly, or at least they do inside the protagonist’s mind.

For its first twenty minutes, Roya is filmed from a partial, subjective point of view. She is also covered by a chador that allows her only the narrowest glimpse of Evin Prison in Tehran, where she is being held. Even that is too much: the voices around her, which issue precise instructions in a severe tone, repeatedly demand that she look only downward, at the shoes of those addressing her. But this soon proves to be the least of it. What follows are blows, shoves, screams, and more blows, all experienced from the perspective of a camera that falls, crashes, gets back up, rolls on the ground, and falls again. “Brutal” hardly does it justice.

After this long and visceral introduction, the film begins to accumulate scenes from what appears to be Roya’s life after her release from prison. She moves through them in a semi-catatonic state—she barely speaks throughout the film—encountering family members, learning bits of news, attending funerals, and the like. While the film adopts a somewhat more conventional visual form at this point—abandoning the subjective camera—the sound design continues to generate confusion, as if Roya were unable to fully inhabit the world she has returned to. Or perhaps there is something more complex at work that explains this tone.

Directed by Mahnaz Mohammadi, Roya is intriguing as a concept, though somewhat tangled in its execution. The confusion the film creates is clearly intentional, meant to mirror the mental state of its imprisoned protagonist. Still, at times it becomes too difficult to find any footing in the film’s internal logic or to emotionally connect with a character whose gaze is perpetually vacant. Certain elements—related to her father or to a coerced confession being demanded of her—serve as anchors within this dislocated experience, but aside from those ferocious first twenty minutes, the film remains too cold and distant to fully convey the magnitude of what it is depicting.

As the minutes pass, the story’s connections to present-day Iran become clearer, as details emerge through the comments of those surrounding a protagonist left physically and emotionally numb by her ordeal. It is within this harsh, violent, and cruel environment that the full extent of Roya’s resilience comes into focus—along with that of many women like her, who challenged the regime and who continue, in the face of extreme violence, fighting.