Dream of Silk

It is hard to watch Dream of Silk, knowing that this documentary was made before the Green Movement of 2009, before the uprisings of 2017 and 2019, before Woman, Life, Freedom in 2023, and before the bloody crackdown and war of 2026. The girls in the film do not yet know what lies ahead for them. That is why watching this becomes a painful form of time travel.

We find ourselves in a classroom in Tehran, shortly after 9/11, whilst the future constantly seeps through the frame. Director Nahid Rezaei attended school there herself; she returns to ask the students what they want to do with their lives. At first, they answer candidly: write poetry, get married, earn money. Another wants to go to the moon. But gradually, a different desire emerges: to leave. Now that the United States could bomb them at any moment, thinking about the future seems to make little sense.

Little by little, the school becomes a miniature version of the world outside its walls. Bodies are searched, mirrors banned, the hijab enforced. Girls are suspended for plucking their eyebrows. Inside and outside the building, sanctions restrict life. Even poetry is not spared. One of the girls wants to become a poet, but immediately wonders who will ever be able to afford her writing. Whenever she recites a poem, a loudspeaker cuts through her voice.

Towards the end, Rezaei stands in front of the class and speaks, with a hint of guilt in her voice, that she once wished for a different future for girls. She belongs to the previous generation, that of the revolutionaries. “And revolutionaries are dreamers.” Those words encapsulate the disillusionment of an entire generation: the world she dreamt of never came to pass.

And yet, ordinary life also imposes itself time and again. Young girls hang out together, laughing, talking about love and longing. In the final scenes, one of them sings “Pol” by Googoosh, a song in which lovers build a refuge for their fragile dreams. Their playground is growing ever smaller, yet they continue to fill it with love, poetry and music.

More than twenty years later, we look at these girls and wonder which of them took to the streets in 2009 demanding “Where is my Vote?”. Who took off her headscarf during Woman, Life, Freedom? Who left and who stayed? These are unfair questions to ask of a film, and of the girls who inhabit it. Because within these walls, they still exist before history turns them into symbols: funny, in love, afraid, rebellious.