Trailer for Manuscripts Don't Burn (Dast-Neveshtehaa Nemisoosand).
The means by which an authoritarian regime succeeds in silencing independent voices is the subject of this clandestinely made drama from Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, who still has an unexecuted prison sentence hanging over his head. His brave picture not only makes the viewer complicit in the action, but it is also one of the first to confront so directly the brutality of the Islamic Republic’s feared security apparatus.
A FIPRESCI prizewinner at Cannes, the film opens like a thriller, with working-class man Khosrow running from a pursuer and jumping, in the nick of time, into a car driven by his colleague Morteza. It’s only after we follow Khosrow home and feel sympathy for his sick child and financial problems that we discover that he and Morteza are the torture and assassination arms of the state. Along with their silken-voiced boss, the two men are searching for copies of a banned manuscript.