The Red Suitcase
Directed by Cyrus Neshvad, 2022

While new Iranian filmography consistently challenge orthodoxies, “The Red Suitcase” first launched in 2022, is a welcome vehicle of international protest. Iran has been rocked by civic protests confirming that a long-silenced public have reached a point of no return in their opposition to the regime. Only a ubiquitous and brutal security apparatus, and a vast secret service, is now holding the citizens of the Islamic Republic tenuously to ransom. In this brutal, secretive theocracy, women have suffered disproportionately from the callous tentacles of a moralistic police.

Their invasive networks of neighbourhood informing, effectively suffocate public life. Into this depressing theatre of moral suppression comes the positive feedback about this Oscar-nominated short film which (conversely) puts Iran in a more positive focus. For those in despair, it is a reminder that the Ayatollahs are not beyond overt international lampooning, or indeed targeted global opprobrium, on the greatest of world stages, Hollywood.

Oscar-shortlisted, “The Red Suitcase” demonstrates the potential of protest filmography to place injustices powerfully on the global agenda, It revels more in a cinematographic instant than the past torturous year of sporadic street war against the Iranian authorities. Set in Luxembourg’s airport, it tells the story of a 16-year-old Iranian girl from Tehran nervously shedding her headscarf in defiance of a medieval male dictatorship. For film director Cyrus Neshvad, born in Iran but raised in Luxemburg, his film: “exposes the virus of a regime cancerous to the beautiful body of my birth country….Once we get this virus out, the body will be flourishing again,” he told AFP. The movie includes stark photo-imagery of Iranian state repression, and a film montage of police battening retreating female protestors.

Vociferous demonstrations in Iran were sparked by the 2022 death in custody of a young Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, detained for incorrectly wearing the headscarf mandated by religious chiefs. The scale and intensity of street rioting genuinely threatened the Islamic theocrats who took power in 1979. The Red Suitcase carries forward the momentum of the current uprising in Iran but was filmed a year before it started. Despite the cuff-holds of a ubiquitous........

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