Long before she began assembling the fragments that would become Rehearsals for a Revolution , Pegah Ahangarani had already spent much of her life moving between cinema and memory.
Born in Iran in 1984 and now based in London, Pegah entered the film world at the age of seven in The Singer Cat by Kambuzia Partovi.
Her breakthrough came with the lead role in The Girl in the Sneakers by Rasoul Sadrameli, launching a screen career that would span more than forty films. Yet alongside acting, another practice slowly emerged — documentary filmmaking.
Across shorts such as I Am Trying To Remember (2021), My Father (2023), and As I Lay Dying (2025), co-directed with her fellow poetic filmmaker Mohammadreza Farzad , and shown at festivals such as Toronto's Hot Docs, Amsterdam's IDFA and Busan, Pegah repeatedly returned to family archives, political memory and the afterlives of history. Rehearsals for a Revolution , her first feature documentary, presented in the Special Screenings section of the Cannes Film Festival' s Official Section and awarded with the L’Œil d'Or documentary prize, feels like the culmination of those concerns.
The film unfolds through five chapters, portraying relatives and mentors — her parents Jamshid Ahangarani and Manijeh Hekmat, both filmmakers, and her youngest uncle Rashid with a tragic destiny, a student journalist and supporter of President Khatami; her primary school teacher who has been persecuted and fired for her Western tastes, her friend Amir who left Iran for good and finally her little daughter Lily, symbolising the hope for the future.
All of them are figures of resistance through whom Pegah reconstructs over forty years of Iranian history, from the aftermath of the 1979 revolution to more recent conflicts and upheavals.
But if the film maps collective history, it does so through an intensely personal grammar of images.
"Some memories always stayed with me," Pegah admits to The New Arab. "Whenever I remembered my past, they came back. But some others were suggested by the archives. Suddenly, I would see one image, and it would return me to one specific moment of my childhood.” When memory becomes resistance Memory in Rehearsals for a Revolution arrives through shifting textures: Super 8 reels, 16mm family footage, photographs, newspapers, voice recordings, television images, protest videos, mobile phone recordings, YouTube uploads, and even animation. What initially appears as an eclectic visual collage gradually reveals an internal logic.
"What I didn't plan at the beginning," Pegah explains, "but what the material itself demanded, was that each era corresponded to a different image language."
Each chapter is defined not only by historical events but by the visual forms through which that period was experienced.
The changing formats become a history of spectatorship itself. "I had no images for the third part," she recalls. "Then I remembered how people used to queue outside newsstands. Back then, our relationship with events was mediated through newspapers." The absence of images became an image in itself.
Most of the archives came from her own family. Her parents preserved decades of footage, including 16mm reels that her mother — filmmaker and writer Manijeh Hekmat — digitised over the years.
"It belonged to my mother and father," Pegah says. "My mother scanned everything."
But the archive extends beyond the domestic. Anonymous videos found online sit alongside intimate home recordings. Protest footage enters the same space as family celebrations. Personal memory dissolves into collective history.
"I combined all of them together," she says.
The result creates one of the film's most striking visual effects: history feels less like chronology than like sediment, layers accumulating on top of one another.
The process took more than six years. From the outset, Pegah knew the film would be divided into five chapters corresponding simultaneously to five periods of her own life and five moments in Iranian history.
"I knew the first chapter would be about my father and another one about my uncle Rashid," she says.
Her mother would emerge as another central figure; elsewhere, the film moves through mentors, friendships and political awakenings. Stepping into history Yet the film also charts Pegah's own gradual entry into history. For much of the documentary, she remains almost hidden inside the images.
"Until episode four, I only appear in the background," she says. Then everything changes. "From episode four, when I became directly involved in events, I could no longer remain only the narrator."
In that chapter, Pegah suddenly stops the footage. The image shows her younger self during the protests.
"From that point, I am no longer passive," she says. "I decided to pause on my own image."
The moment feels like the emotional centre of the film.
"There were millions of people in the streets," she remembers now. "I believed the government had to hear us."
Then came the violence. "Before that day, I was naïve and innocent," she says. "After I saw dead bodies in the street, everything changed." It became her political turning point.
The scene takes on another layer because the footage itself was discovered by accident. Pegah had no visual record of herself from that period. Then, her friends sent her archival material from the protests.
"I suddenly saw myself on the rooftop," she recalls. "I had no idea that footage existed."
This unexpected discovery transformed the film. The filmmaker became subject; the archivist entered the archive.
Throughout Rehearsals for a Revolution , these encounters with forgotten images repeatedly alter the narrative. One of the earliest findings concerned Dawood, a man appearing in footage sent by Pegah's father.
"At first I was only gathering personal archives," she says. "Later, I realised Dawood had been executed."
The revelation echoed concerns already present in her earlier shorts, such as I am Trying to Remember .
"Some of my parents' friends were executed," she says quietly. "More than one."
The documentary gradually reveals itself as a work about inheritance: not only political but also emotional. Pegah's parents belonged to the revolutionary generation of 1979. Looking back, she resists retrospective judgment.
"They were tired of the monarchy," she says. "They wanted something different."
The paradox remains difficult: intellectuals supporting a conservative religious leader such as Ruhollah Khomeini.
"I don’t agree," she says. "But I understand."
That comprehension deepens when she recognises herself in her father's post-revolution disappointment.
"There was hope," she recalls about the protests of her own generation. "Then suddenly it was gone."
Maybe, Pegah admits, that was when she finally understood him. Women carrying history Women become another axis of transmission. Her mother’s life mirrors many of the contradictions explored by the film: working inside official cinema while simultaneously confronting censorship, interrogations and travel restrictions.
"She had many obstacles," Pegah explains. "Her films, her books, interrogations, confiscated passports."
After the Woman, Life, Freedom movement , Hekmat stopped seeking official approval.
"She decided to work underground," Pegah says.
The fifth chapter changed entirely during editing. Pegah had already begun cutting the material when new violence and war erupted.
"I didn't know how to make that episode anymore," she says. "Everything changed.”
Finally, she accepted uncertainty itself as form.
"I realised I had to put the confusion inside the film."
That rupture leads the documentary towards its final gesture.
After decades of archival material marked by executions, revolutions, and disappointment, Rehearsals for a Revolution ends with Pegah's little daughter, Lilly.
"She represents hope," the filmmaker says.
The ending feels significant because the film repeatedly returns to remembrance — yad — the return of the past into the present.
At first glance, the title suggests repetition, history rehearsing itself endlessly. Pegah rejects that reading.
"When I speak about remembering, I’m not saying revolutions always fail," she says. "That isn’t my point."
Instead, memory itself becomes the act of resistance.
"The act of remembering is important."
And perhaps that is what Rehearsals for a Revolution ultimately becomes: not simply an archive of Iran's recent history, but an archive of looking itself — of how images shape memory, how generations inherit unfinished struggles, and how a filmmaker searching through old footage eventually finds herself staring back. Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric, and goEast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films