Shirin Ebadi: a simple lawyer

Directed by Bani Khoshnoudi

Documentary feature
France - 2005

48 min./ Color

Produced by Les Films d'Ici and Article Z
Commisioned by ARTE Thema

 

 

Synopsis

October 2003 - Shirin Ebadi flies back to Tehran after being named the Nobel Peace Prize Winner. Thousands of exuberant Iranians flee to the Tehran airport to welcome her. They have all come to hear her message, hoping for a strong act on her part. But contrary to their expectations, Shirin Ebadi does not want to be an outspoken political figure. She prefers to continue the social and judicial work that she has set out to accomplish.

This is a portrait of Shirin Ebadi: the woman, the activist, the resistant; in her own words. As the new symbol for the fight for democracy in Iran, she expresses herself on the state of Iranian society today, as well as on global issues such as peace, humanity, and education. There is no room for spectacular images in her fight for democracy. Through judicial work and organizations, Shirin Ebadi works as a militant in a day to day battle for the emergence of a new Iranian resistance.


Director's Note

With this portrait, I wanted to reach beyond the image of Shirin Ebadi proposed by the media and unveil a truer idea of who she is. What are her preoccupations? What does she want to accomplish? I wanted to observe her daily life and to give a different picture of the public figure that Shirin Ebadi became once she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.

As a young Iranian woman in exile, my vision of the situation in Iran is distinct and this plays an active role in my relationship with Shirin Ebadi. She explains to me the problems and the needs of today’s Iran, while hoping to communicate and be heard by the largest number of people, in Iran and abroad. The issues that I bring up, the questions that I ask her lead us to a more in-depth dialogue on the important issues in Iran today: the government, the political hopes of the Iranian people, women’s issues, political prisoners, children and the importance of education, and the work done by NGOs and human rights activists.

Shirin Ebadi is an important person for me. Because she is a woman, but most importantly because she is an activist whose whole life is an act of resistance. I ask myself: what are the limits to her fight in a country where fundamental human rights are denied daily? This is how I set out to speak to Shirin Ebadi, in order for her to explain to us the work that is done in Iran to make life better.


WHO IS SHIRIN EBADI?

Shirin Ebadi was the first woman to become judge in Iran at the young age of 30. In 1979, the year of the revolution, she was forced to leave her post as judge because the new Constitution established that women were incapable of occupying such an important position. Unlike many intellectuals of the time, Ebadi did not decide to leave the country, but to resist the new laws that were put in effect. As a Muslim, she confronted injustices rationalized by the Islamic regime as Islamic values or as laws of the Shari’a. This internal, but also international struggle is at the source of many philosophical and practical conflicts that she has undertaken. In 2003, at the age of 56, just 24 years after the revolution, she becomes the first Iranian to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The work and activism that she has maintained and defended for the last thirty years have gained her this important international acclaim, as well as the complex national reputation and renown that she has upheld.

Fighting against the injustices and the repression inflicted by the revolutionary Islamic regime, Ebadi as a prominent lawyer has accepted to defend journalists, students, intellectuals and the families of those imprisoned and condemned to heavy sentences or the death penalty, enduring the high risks that this entails. In 2000, Ebadi was imprisoned because of her choices, her decisions and her explicit demands for equal and human rights for all, especially for women and children in a patriarchal society.