What Mehdi Mahmoudian Saw Inside the Iranian Prison System
On a rainy winter afternoon in 2001, Mehdi Mahmoudian, a political dissident in Tehran, noticed a man with an amputated hand struggling to repair his car. Mahmoudian, who was in his twenties, worked in a nearby print shop. He immediately recognized the man as a former guard who had used his left hand to torture Mahmoudian in Towhid Prison two years earlier.
Mahmoudian decided to help his torturer. He invited the man into his shop, offered him tea, and recruited a co-worker to fix his car. Hours later, when the man was preparing to leave, Mahmoudian reintroduced himself as his former prisoner. Stunned, the man drove away without responding. But he returned to the print shop the next day and asked for Mahmoudian’s forgiveness. He said it was the fault of the authorities; he was just doing his job, and he regretted it.
The encounter bears striking parallels to the opening of the film “It Was Just an Accident,” which Mahmoudian co-wrote with the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. In an early scene, an auto mechanic named Vahid recognizes his former torturer by the distinctive squeak of his prosthetic leg. Vahid kidnaps the man, nicknamed Peg-Leg, in a white van, and collects a ragtag team of former detainees from across Tehran to try to certify his identity. The feature was shot over twenty-eight days, covertly, mostly within the confines of the van.
Mahmoudian and Panahi met in the notorious Evin House of Detention in 2022, while they were both serving sentences. Panahi told me that, over seven months, they became friends, and Mahmoudian even cared for him when he contracted COVID. Shortly before Panahi was released, Mahmoudian embraced him and whispered in his ear, “Don’t forget the guys in prison.”
Later, after Mahmoudian, too, was free, Panahi invited him to collaborate on a script that would draw on their collective experience in Iran’s prison system. The film encapsulates the plight of Iranians who have endured incarceration, interrogation, and torture at the hands of the Islamic Republic. But it also asks those same Iranians to empathize with their oppressors.
On January 31st, not long after his screenplay for “It Was Just an Accident” was nominated for an Oscar, Mahmoudian was arrested again. He had just signed a joint statement that blamed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for the killings and arrests of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets across the country. Mahmoudian was released on bail on February 17th, and spoke with me via video chat from his home in Tehran a few days ago. I reached him briefly on Saturday, hours after the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran; he said only that he was unharmed, then his signal cut out. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You were recently released from prison, on February 17th. How are you doing? How would you describe your condition right now?
To be honest, getting released from prison in this situation does not make me happy. In the past sixteen years, I’ve spent about nine years in prison. I’ve been arrested thirteen times, and I have been released from prison many times before.
All the prison sentences that I endured in the past were for the goal of having fewer people killed on the streets. Any acts of resistance done by myself, or by others for decades before me, were in order to stop the Islamic Republic before it could cause such bloodshed, and to either make it fall or to change it from within. Getting released from prison did not have any joy this time, because thousands of people were still in prison, and thousands of families are mourning the deaths of their loved ones. If I were to summarize it in one sentence: We’re not good.
Take us back to the moment when you were arrested.
I was at home with two friends. It was 2:30 A.M. Two of us were up, and one of us was sleeping. They opened the door very quickly, and before we could realize what was going on, within two or three seconds, they put a gun to my head and my friend’s head. The friend who was sleeping also had a gun put to his head—he woke up feeling the pressure of the gun. A team entered through the window, and six other people came in through the door. This was a so-called antiterrorism team that they had sent for us. We are just three political activists who have been living together—and besides writing and speaking, we have never had any other arms.
Can we name the other two activists?
Yes, of course. Their names are Abdollah Momeni and Vida Rabbani. We’re three of the seventeen people who signed this statement—known activists who gave a warning to the government before the protests, and said, “Do not kill people.” After the massacre, we issued this statement condemning the state. These are activists who are mostly inside Iran. Some of them are outside, but they’re still connected to the inside.
How were you treated during those weeks in prison? Can you describe some of your living conditions?
I think the way we were treated is not a good assessment of anything, because they know that we are recognized figures, and our names are out in the media, so they try to project a more humane form of treatment with us. But I would like to take this opportunity to tell you how they have treated others.
Please do tell me about other prisoners. But I would just like to know about your situation first—which prison was it?
The first one was in Chalus. The next one, Sari, was a high-security one. And the last one was Nowshahr, which is a very old prison that’s in bad condition—almost destroyed.
And in the last prison, what were the quarters like? How many prisoners were in there, and who were you staying with? Were there other political prisoners?
Everyone who was accompanying us had been arrested in these recent protests. It was a cell of about twenty-five metres, and at the peak of the protests they put thirty-three of us in that one room. For the first few nights, when it was very crowded, we had to take turns sleeping, because there wasn’t enough room for everyone to sleep.
Even though the majority of prisoners were under twenty-five years of age or so, they had been beaten up and tortured so severely that, after weeks, you could still see the signs—the black spots and the wounds on their bodies.
One of them was a person whose eight-month-old baby was tortured in front of his eyes. They had threatened that they were going to hang the baby if he didn’t confess to what they wanted him to confess. For many days, this man, who was around thirty-two years old, if I remember correctly, could only talk about his baby. To anyone he saw—any prison official, any guard—he kept saying, “What fault does my eight-month-old child have? He didn’t do anything.”
The baby was in the cell as well? Or this man had seen this torture beforehand and was traumatized and relayed that?
He was arrested together with his wife and their baby. They had gone to arrest him and his wife, and because the child was alone, they had to take the child as well. He was taken to the men’s section of the prison. Later, he learned that the child was with the mother, but they had not told him that, and they kept saying to him, “If you don’t confess, we’re going to hang your baby.” He didn't know what conditions the mother or the child were in.
The other person whose story really moved us was someone who was arrested with his wife. He was beaten up in front of his wife, and his wife was beaten up in front of him—and they had also arrested the wife’s fourteen-year-old brother and beaten him up as well. They said, Either you sign the papers that we give you—it’s a confession, but we won’t tell you what’s on it—or it’s going to get worse. And the three of them ended up having to sign the pages.
Among the people in the cell, three suffered from very severe mental-health issues, and they would only be calmed down with heavy drugs. Clearly, prison was not the place for them to be. One of them was kept for thirty-five days, the other one was kept for forty days, and they were constantly drugged in order to be kept quiet. And they were kids.
You’ve been in and out of prison so many times. What was different about this time?
Before these recent protests, people who had taken to the streets had had very specific, clear humanistic and civil-rights demands. But this time, people who had taken to the streets had a linear narrative of what they wanted, and that was: We need to return to the past in order to fix things. They were much more representative of the common people, of the masses, rather than people who were politically active.
And this is what you saw reflected in the actual prison?
That’s exactly what I saw in prison. The previous times that I had gone to prison, it was mostly political activists who were getting imprisoned, and they had an idea of what the political situation was like, and they were aware of the demands of the activist groups. But this time, these were just common people without any experience in activism. The people who were in prison were braver, and their bravery was not out of knowledge but out of having nothing to lose. They had no other choice.
Were you physically harmed at all when you were arrested, or while you were in prison?
This time, or previous times?
This time.
Physically, no. I wasn’t harmed when they were arresting me; it was just a punch, and that’s not a big deal. But looking at what I have experienced before and comparing it, I have never experienced anything like what I’m going through now, after I was released, and that is hours and hours of crying every day. Basically any time I’m alone, I am crying. And this is true about all three of us—the three of us that I mentioned. We were all released, and we’re all spending our days like this.
Why is it so much more emotional this time?
The most important reason is that everything that we had predicted, and still hoped would not happen, happened all at once. Unlike the previous times, when they were beating people up in order to make them confess to something, this time they were also beating people up for the sake of beating them up, in order to destroy their dignity and humanity.
We didn’t get a chance to mourn the people who were killed in the protests—we were removed from society, so we couldn’t do collective mourning. Even after we were released, we were seeing the photos of all the people who were killed on the walls all over town.
Where were you when the demonstrations started? And what were your first thoughts, based on all of the political uprisings you’ve witnessed? Was this the broadest discontent that you’ve seen?
This was not the biggest movement. We had the reform movements in 1996 and ’97, when people went out to the polls and they voted for Mohammad Khatami for the Presidency—we had twenty-four, twenty-five million people who voted. So that was a bigger movement than what we’re seeing now.
This wasn’t the biggest in terms of the street, either. For instance, in 2009, we were able to mobilize a much larger body of people onto the streets, demonstrating peacefully. And in 2022 with the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, we also saw people staying on the streets both in larger numbers and for a longer time. With “Women, Life, Freedom,” people took to the streets for almost six months after the initial protests.
The way this was distinct from the other times was that people very clearly demanded change—the fall of the regime.
You were among seventeen dissident lawyers, artists, and activists who signed a statement holding the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, responsible for the bloody crackdown against protesters in January. How did that come about?
This statement began with a very clear goal, and that was developing an opposition inside Iran. The people who issued this statement have collectively been in prison for eighty years, and there are people among us who have had up to four members of their family killed by the Islamic Republic. The people who issued this statement have had decades of political-resistance experience, and, based on experience, they knew what violence was awaiting us when Reza Pahlavi’s call to protest came. This does not mean at all that he did not have the right to call people—he did.
The first statement we issued in this round of protests was a statement saying to the state, to the Islamic Republic, to not commit atrocities, based on what we could predict, and we said that it is the right of people to issue statements and it is the right of people to protest, and therefore we just wanted to warn the state before it committed bloodshed for those two days.
The second statement that we issued was after the massacre, and what we wanted to do was break the government’s false narrative that people who were protesting were terrorists. We wanted to correct that misinformation, and say that the first person who was responsible for all the massacres was Ali Khamenei.
You also named Khamenei this in an interview with the BBC. What was the reaction when you did that? Some people would’ve seen that as a death wish.
This was not the first time I have named Khamenei, and said that he’s responsible. When he decided to stop the import of COVID vaccines made by the U.S. and the U.K. into Iran, I also called him personally responsible for the deaths of many. This time, what was different for me was that the number of people killed was so large that me talking about the truth, and it being a death wish, did not really matter. I wasn’t thinking about it at all.
Us demanding that Ali Khamenei should be put aside from power was not the personal vengeance of people who were taken to prison collectively for eighty years, or whose family members were killed by him and by his orders. It was a way to put a stop to crimes against humanity, committed by the regime in a systematic, institutionalized way.
You’re the co-writer of the film “It Was Just an Accident,” which was nominated for an Oscar right before you were arrested. What was it like to return to prison, having just achieved international recognition for a film that takes aim at the very government that is arresting you?
The news of the Academy nominations came exactly on the days that people were on the streets, and the internet was cut off in Tehran. I cannot say that the news did not make me happy, because it did—it was perhaps the biggest news of my life. Many people don’t experience something like that. But I couldn’t express my happiness, because so many people were getting killed.
What Mr. Panahi tried to show in this film is that we have a pluralist society and nation, and it is not violent, even with its enemies. Any help that I tried to give was in order to make that narrative heard better throughout the world. But then the day that this film got to the peak of its accolades and recognition in the world was exactly the peak of the massacres happening in Iran.
Why do you believe Panahi invited you to collaborate on this film?
First of all, I had had the experience of coming face to face with my torturers, and second, the experience that I’d had in prison helped me be able to help with this project. Because of my good networking skills, I’ve been in touch with many prisoners.
The biggest place where I helped with the film was writing the dialogue, and also the sequence with the tree—the penultimate sequence.
I want to talk about that sequence. But first, could you tell me about meeting your torturer?
I was arrested for the first time when I was twenty years old—which was about twenty-seven years ago. For three days, they handcuffed my hands behind my body. I was on the floor, and they would put water and food on me from above. I had to go to the bathroom right there, in my pants, while lying down, for all of those days, and that caused a lot of problems and damage to my kidneys. I was still dealing with my kidney injuries about two or three years after that incident. And I was sitting in my office one day, and my torturer had to come to my office with his family, and I recognized him because his arm was chopped off.
What did you do?
It’s very similar to the story in the film. His car had broken down, and one of the people who worked for me fixed his car, and I hosted him. But then at the last minute before he left, I told him, “I’m one of those people that you tortured.”
And what did he say?
That second, he left out of fear. But then the next day, he came back and he apologized, and he said, “Well, it was my job, and I had to do it because it’s my job.”
I just want to stress that the idea of the film belongs to Mr. Panahi, because this is a common experience shared by many prisoners. I know at least ten other people who have run into their interrogators and torturers. All the characters you see in the film are based on real characters in the world, in Iran. And anything that they narrate, in terms of their tortures, is something that has happened in reality.
How did you and Panahi first meet each other?
Of course, I knew Mr. Panahi before, through his work, but this mutual getting to know each other happened when we were in prison. I had mentioned that I was writing stories based on what I was seeing from the other prisoners. And when I got released about two years ago—one of the times that I got released—Mr. Panahi got released a few months before me, and he contacted me and said that he had a script, and he gave me the honor of working with him on the dialogue.
Panahi has said some pretty remarkable things about you that he observed while you were in prison together—he has called you a “rare ethical witness” to other prisoners. He told me that you were calm, kind, and felt a sense of responsibility for others, especially new arrivals.
He’s very kind, but anything I have done was the absolute minimum that I consider my responsibility toward other humans. I live in a society that believes that people’s value comes from what they believe in—but I follow the school of thought that just believes that humans have value for the sake of being human beings.
Where do you think this sense of responsibility and empathy comes from? Does it have to do with being imprisoned over and over and over again?
Yes, I want to say that one of the positive points about going to prison so many times is exactly that. When I was twenty-two years old, I went through a mock execution. But of course, mock executions are not known as “mock” to the person who experiences them. They performed an execution by putting a noose around our necks and putting us on stools and taking us to a dark room while blindfolded, and they kept us on these stools with the noose around our necks for at least half an hour—for half an hour to an hour. And then they pulled the stools out from under our feet and we fell down because the nooses were loose.
When you’re put in that position, you will understand the value of being a human. We were about twelve people standing next to one another, and in that hour we weren’t thinking about what ethnicity we’re from, the color of our skin, what ideology we believe in. It was none of that. It was just twelve human beings. [He starts to cry.] I’m sorry that the interview became this gloomy.
Please! So many people have spoken about how you don’t have any prejudice in prison. No matter who comes through the door, you receive them with empathy. That is your reputation. Understanding the origin of that openness is important. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you.
I’d like to talk about the Twelve-Day War. I know that you were imprisoned when Israeli missiles struck Evin Prison. You’ve written that, amid the chaos, you managed to help some of the prison guards, the interrogators, who were stuck under the rubble. Why did you choose to do that?
I did not rescue interrogators. I rescued human beings—people who were caught under the rubble or in a fire. In order for me and my friends to save them, we were not asking them what they did for a living.
O.K., but did you recognize them as people who worked at the prison? I know they’re all humans first.
One section of the prison that was destroyed was the clinic. That’s what was close to us—and by going to the clinic, we would see those doctors and anyone else who worked there. So yes, of course, we recognized them. Another part that got destroyed was a ward known as 209, which is held by the intelligence forces of the regime. Everyone knows who works there, and we were saving those people as well.
What do you mean when you say you were saving those people? Can you describe that a little more clearly? That cell was damaged, you were free, you knew that there were people in there who were injured—and what did you do?
One part that got damaged near us was the administrative section of 209, and so my friends and I took three or four people out of the rubble in the administrative section. Another part that was also damaged was where they held the prisoners of 209. The gates had been locked, and it had trapped both the prisoners and the prison guards who worked there, and so we broke the locks and we opened the gates, and we were able to pull the prisoners and the prison guards out. But the painful part is, about an hour and a half after that, when they got full control again, the very person that I helped come out of the prison put a gun to my head and forced me into prison again.
While we were saving them—the interrogators or the prison officials—we were very well aware that as soon as they got control back, they were going to suppress us and put us back into the wards with a gun to our heads.
I asked about this anecdote because it reminds me of something that Shiva says in “It Was Just an Accident,” while she and the others are debating what to do with Peg-Leg. Shiva says, “It’s not because they resorted to violence that we should, too.”
What we talk about when we talk about nonviolence—it’s not out of fear, or out of the lack of ability to be violent, but in order to prove that we are human. It is what we think is best, and it is what we think is necessary for the future of the country. We also wanted to say in the film that the way the family of the interrogator was getting treated, out of kindness and responsibility, had much better results than if we were to treat him the way he treated us.
I was told that you played a crucial role in saving one of the most important and climactic scenes in the film—a sequence where the former prisoners tie their torturer to a tree and force him to confess. What were you channelling to help these actors make this scene as believable as it was?
I don’t know if we can call it saving the film—the main thing was done by Mr. Panahi himself. But he called me and said, “I have a few takes of that sequence, and it’s not coming together.” And he asked me to go on the set. What I did was to remind the three actors about who the characters were and what has happened to them, and I explained what would come out of all those events and happenings.
Can you be a little more specific?
For instance, to Shiva, I said, You are playing the role of a character based on a political prisoner whose name is Fariba Pajooh, and these are the things that have happened to her. Fariba is now in the United States. And when I told the actor what had happened to this person, she cried. When she was in front of the camera acting, it was as if Fariba herself was yelling at the interrogator.
For Vahid, I described the people who were combined in that one character that he was playing. I spoke about the specific pains that he went through until he got to that point.
Could you describe how you create these composites? What are you drawing from?
Mr. Panahi is the one who created those characters. I just helped with writing the dialogue.
Then tell me about a particular piece of dialogue that you wrote that came from life.
Almost everything that’s said about the interrogator are direct experiences of the prisoners that I have met and dealt with. For instance, when Shiva says “with that dirty mouth of yours, you’d whisper in my ear,” this is something that Fariba had experienced when she got out of jail after ten years. Her father died shortly after—but her dying father apparently was whispering something in her ear from behind her, and Fariba turned around and slapped him, unintentionally, because it brought back the sensation and the sounds that she had experienced with her interrogator in prison.
The character of the bride, Golrokh, has a line about how the interrogator “spread the rumor that I had collaborated with them,” even though she never betrayed anyone. This is also the experience of a journalist about whom they spread the rumor that she was the person who gave information about all of her friends. For many years, people were under that impression about her—and then she committed suicide.
So all of the characters are composites of people you’ve met, either in prison or in your activism.
Yes, they are composites in the sense that they narrate the stories of what has happened to a number of people. One character might have different stories, different narratives, based on everything that has happened to different real people.
The message of the film seems to be about forgiveness, and about finding empathy even for your oppressor. At the same time, the message that I’ve been hearing from so many Iranians right now, as Trump threatens to bomb Iran, is that they want war—people who never believed in foreign intervention before are now desperate for something that will break the cycle of violence. What do you think about that?
As someone who has value for human life, I cannot defend war in any way, under any circumstance. I do not consider war to be to the advantage of people. I also believe that war will not bring anything other than the massacre of civilians and absolute destruction. But what the people of Iran might want or might not want, I think, will not change what the United States is going to do. What determines what happens with war is what advantages there will be for the party that’s going to attack. I can at the very least hope that there will be no war, and that the Islamic Republic will fall by the power of the people of Iran. And I can also hope that if there happens to be a war, what benefits the United States overlaps with what benefits the people of Iran.
My hope is that what happened to Afghanistan does not get repeated in Iran—that, after twenty years of war and massacre, the people will not be given into the hands of the radical Taliban. I hope that the people of Iran will not be forgotten like that.
Based on the way the regime is treating you and all these other political activists—imprisoning you all—what does that indicate about the regime? Is this the weakest you’ve seen it in your lifetime?
The Islamic Republic is on the verge of falling. All it needs is just the push of a finger for it to fall. That’s why it has killed the maximum number of people imaginable—because the Islamic Republic itself does not believe that it’s going to last. ♦
This conversation was translated by Sheida Dayani.