Hot Docs ’26: A War on Women

Here is an incovenient but telling truth for your consideration. When the Islamist Ruhollah Khomeini first launched his revolution against the Shah in 1963, he wasn’t motivated by corruption or the SAVAK secret police. He was outraged by the Shah’s decision to grant women the right to vote. Yet, Jimmy Carter believed Iran would better served with Khomeini as its ruler. Most Iranian women knew better. By now, most of the Iranian men agree. However, for decades, women were in the vanguard of the Iranian resistance movement. Iranian filmmaker Raha Shirazi and several leading Iranian women dissidents take stock of the rights they lost after the Islamic Revolution and their long continuing campaign to win them back in her documentary A War on Women, which screens again after its premiere at this year’s Hot Docs festival.

During the Shah’s reign, women’s rights were steadily improving. They could dress however they pleased and could pursue their education as far as their talents allowed. They could also sing and dance in public and show their hair, without fear of acid attacks. Mahnaz Afkhami knows this better than anyone, because she was Minister for Women’s Affairs in the 1978 government. As she explains, she was in New York forming a United Nation’s subsidiary devoted to women’s rights when the Shah fell. For her own safety, she never returned home.

Indeed, Shirazi assembled a small but powerful cast of expert witnesses, who testify first-hand regarding the systematic oppression of women by the current Iranian regime. Several have paid dearly for their free-thinking, such as Elahe Tavakolian, who was blinded in one eye when the Iranian “Morality Police” shot her during a “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest.

Likewise, Shaparak Shajarizadeh became an international online cause celeb after she was arrested for removing her headscarf. Journalist Masih Alinejad and actress Golshifteh Farhani (formerly considered the rough equivalent of Iran’s “sweetheart”) movingly discuss the pain of exile and the deep, gnawing fear for loved ones left behind.

After watching the women’s harrowing and heartbreaking testimony elicited by Shirazi, any morally tone-deaf ideologue who protested on behalf of the Iranian regime should feel profound shame and stomach-churning embarrassment. Regardless, of your opinions of Trump’s management of the military conflict, it is clear the Iranian people would be much better off without their current oppressors.

Again and again, the women of A War on Women explicitly establish the majority of Iranian women were always opposed to the regime. The big change came with the Green Movement protests of 2009, when the men finally joined them in force.

Consequently, it will be impossible to pretend the Iranian regime represents the will of its people after screening A War on Women. It is the King Kong of reality checks, but it is also a keenly sensitive and enormously moving work of nonfiction filmmaking. It is a film that demands your attention and needs to be seen. Very highly recommended, A War on Women screens again this Thursday (4/30) during Hot Docs ’26.