Winner of the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, this searing knockout by Mohammad Rasoulof was directed in defiance of a lifetime ban on filmmaking by the Iranian government. There Is No Evil is divided into four discrete stories, each concerned with the effects of capital punishment in Iran, the country with the highest rate of executions per capita of anywhere on the globe. Rasoulof uses the anthology structure to interrogate the myriad ways these government executions impact Iran’s citizenry, as evinced by the broad range of the film’s protagonists : a middle class family man, a company of conscripted soldiers, a pair of young lovers in the countryside, and a long-lost extended family. Etched with a profound moral clarity, each of the four parables exposes the paradoxes of an oppressive system the filmmaker knows all too well. Like Jafar Panahi, his collaborator on The White Meadows (WFF 2011), Rasoulof has been sentenced to prison in his own country for the crime of cinema, or as he has been officially charged, creating “propaganda against the system.” “Pulses with humor, romance, and life. Rasoulof has turned filmmaking into an act of resistance” (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times). “A major work of Iranian cinema… an enraging, enthralling, enduring testament” (The Film Stage). (MK)

Presented with support from UW-Madison Middle East Studies Program.