Sepideh Farsi experienced revolution at 13, jail at 16 and exile at 18, when she finally fled Iran in 1984 following eight months in prison. She has since made her home in France, building a career as a filmmaker who moves between documentary and fiction, with works including “Red Rose” (2014) and the animated feature “The Siren” (2023). From Paris, she has never stopped speaking out for democracy in her country of birth, becoming one of the most outspoken and widely respected Iranian voices in French media during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, and again during the brutal crackdown early this year. Since February 28, 2026, she has publicly opposed the US-Israeli military intervention, arguing against regime change imposed from outside through bombs.
Her lifelong fight against oppression, and the Western-backed wars that sustain it, has extended to the fate of Palestinians. Her most recent documentary, Put Your Hand on Your Hand and Walk, centers on the young photographer Fatmah Hassouna, who was killed by Israel in April 2025. A highlight at last year’s Cannes Festival, this poignant, intimate portrait of a friend lost was also a powerful case against Israel’s crimes in Gaza and the international community’s complicit inaction in the face of a genocide in the making.
“Tehran Without Permission” was shot in 2009, as Farsi set out to document life in the city she loved in the lead-up to that year’s presidential election. Unable to film legally, she picked up her mobile phone. Drifting through the city, she speaks with women in beauty salons, men in cafés, taxi drivers, street artists, restless young people. The result is a collage of raw, unpolished moments: an intimate record of Iranians confiding their fears, their frustrations, their sense of a future squeezed between international sanctions and state repression.
Seventeen years later, with Tehran under bombs, the film has found a new and urgent resonance.
The film will be followed by a discussion with journalist Nadja Vancauwenberghe and the audience.
