Born in Evin, Maryam Zaree, 96’, Germany / Austria, ZDF 13.12.2021, OV with English subtitles

In 1983, a girl is born in the Evin prison in Iran, both parents arrested in the wake of Ayatollah Khomeini’s seizure of power. When Maryam Zaree is two, her mother manages to flee to Germany. In 2018, now a famous actress, the daughter sets out to make a documentary about her own story. “The private is political and the political private. With this conviction, Maryam Zaree works through the complexities of trauma and denial”, says the film distribution text. Suppression as a means to successful integration is expected of refugees even today, and Zaree is doubtful about it: “These stories help us to understand how we want to live with one another and how not. They are a moral compass in times when our human values are being eroded again.”

Maryam Zaree (*1983) is a German actress, filmmaker and author born in Iran. As an actress, she initially enjoyed success in theatre, in feature films such as Das kleine Fernsehspiel’s Shahada (2011) by Burhan Qurbani or the successful series 4 Blocks, for which she received the Adolf Grimme Award, among others. Her first own directorial work was the autobiographical documentary Born in Evin (2021) in collaboration with Das kleine Fernsehspiel, for which she received the Hessian and German Film Awards.