They are activists in a clandestine clinic, radical tattoo artist, Kurdish student or militant designer against the Iranian regime. They are called Somayeh, Mehdi, Ehsan, Sogand and Khatereh. It was through their gaze and in their steps that the journalist Mortaza Behbudi chose to lead his immersion in an Iran upset by the death of Mahsa Amini, September 16, 2022. “The eruption of a volcano whose fire had been rushing for a long time”, he writes.
This fall it becomes the only European journalist this fall to infiltrate an Iran taken between thirst for freedom and conservative screed. Thanks to his Afghan refugee status, he returned there as a reporter four times in four months; But also as a friend and child of a country where he lived until his 16 years.
Be wary of everything
With the procrastination of the five Iranians whom he chose to follow, Mortaza Behboudi also delivers the making of Paying of his risky business in the shadow of the repression orchestrated by the guards of the revolution. The author, and his co -author, the great reporter and director, Marine Courtade, know the fate reserved by the Islamic Republic with the nails that exceed: 79 journalists were arrested for having covered the popular protest movement that broke out after September 16 2024. And three French “state hostages” are still in the hands of the regime: Cécile Kohler, Jacques Paris and Olivier Rondeau.
The stratagems are therefore vital to circulate and collect the word of those who suffocate: adopt a conservative look, identify the omnipresent in civilian clothes, thwart the overly curious taxi drivers, use VPN on phones and computers, hide its material. And above all, be wary of everything, all the time.
And this question that praises the reporter: how to hear the beating heart of the Iranians and bring their words out, without compromising them, and without putting themselves in danger? The confidence that Ehsan, Sogand, Somayeh, Mehdi and Khatereh grant him is only stronger.
The author, who also revisits his childhood and uninhibited racism of which the Afghan refugees are victims, offers the private reader of Persian stay, a sensory journey, from Ispahan to Karadj via Tehran.
“I swung you to the guards of the revolution”
It was in this capital that he made, without knowing it, his last trip in December 2022. Coming to meet Khatereh, author of a poster with the slogan “Life Liberty”, who had toured social networks, Its infiltration runs short. One night, when he returns to his youth hostel, “A gringalet” Slips him: “I know you are a journalist. I swung to you at the Guardians of the Revolutionary. They will come and pick you up. »» Three sentences that sound like a conviction to life and open onto the stifling story of his flight.
Ironically, Mortaza Behboudi will finally be stopped not in Iran, but by the Taliban in Afghanistan where he went a month later. After ten months of detention in jails “As dismal as Evin prison” In Tehran, he found to his surprise, Sogand, in Paris. The student, the first with whom he linked when he arrived in September 2022, obtained a visa in France. Meanwhile, in Iran, “The volcano went back to sleep, but the lava continues to be fooled in depth”. Sogand shares a dream, with his mother who stayed in the country: “Continue the fight with the Iranian diaspora to obtain the fall of the regime and the total freedom of women”.
(Tagstotranslate) Freedom of the press