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Rehearsals for a Revolution turns family memory into a way of reading Iran’s political history. Pegah Ahangarani’s documentary follows five relatives and mentors through personal archives and public records, tracing a story that begins in 1979. Its force lies in the connection between intimate lives and the upheavals that shape them.
What Rehearsals for a Revolution is about
Directed and co-written by Ahangarani, the 2026 documentary is built around five portraits of relatives and mentors, each presented as an expression of resistance. Rather than treating Iranian history as a distant sequence of events, it approaches that history through people whose lives and memories are bound up with it. The film’s account reaches across more than four decades, beginning in 1979, according to Sony Pictures Classics’ synopsis.
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The structure gives the political story a human scale. A father, a literature teacher and other people close to the filmmaker become points of entry into a larger record of protest, repression and change. The result is not simply a family chronicle set against history: the private memories and public events illuminate one another.
How the film connects private archives to public history
Ahangarani draws on home movies, protest footage, newspapers, recorded voices and other personal material. In its account of the film, Festival de Cannes writer Tarik Khaldi describes a mix that includes family Super 8, YouTube video, animation and voice recordings. These different forms let the film move between the texture of remembered life and the broader public record.
#1 Best Overall
The archive is more than illustration: it is the material through which the film considers what people remember, preserve and pass on. Family images can feel immediate and intimate; protest footage and newspapers place those lives within forces larger than any one household. The movement between them gives the documentary its essay-like shape and makes its political history personal without reducing it to a single family’s experience.
Khaldi calls the archival film “beautiful and intense” and writes that it retraces “forty years of disruption, strikes, protests and suppression up to the current war.” That is his characterization in the Cannes article, rather than a quotation from Ahangarani. The film’s use of family materials alongside images of political struggle is what supports its haunting effect: the past is not presented as safely finished, but as something carried in voices and images.
Rank #2
Why the five portraits matter
The portraits place resistance in relationships and lived experience rather than in abstraction. The film’s choice to give separate chapters to different people, as described in the Cannes interview, creates room for distinct memories and perspectives. Its attention to a parent and a teacher also suggests that political inheritance is not only a matter of public events; it travels through families, education and the stories people tell about the past.
That approach makes the film’s scale both its strength and its discipline. It follows particular lives instead of claiming to provide a comprehensive history of Iran. The portraits offer a personal route into a long national story, not a substitute for the full range of voices and experiences that story contains.
Rank #3
- Factory sealed DVD
Festival recognition, credits and running time
Rehearsals for a Revolution appeared in the Cannes Special Screenings section, and Sony Pictures Classics says it won the festival’s L’Œil d’or (Golden Eye) for Best Documentary. Sony also identifies it as an official selection at Telluride and Toronto. The Cannes film record lists the Czech Republic and Spain as production countries, Ahangarani as director and screenwriter, and Ehsan Abdipour, Amir Ahmadi Arian, Arash Ashtiani and Majed Neisi as additional screenwriters.
Published running times do not match: Cannes lists 95 minutes, while Métropole Films and AFI FEST list 98. The available listings do not establish whether the difference reflects territorial cuts or another versioning change, so neither figure should be treated as definitive for every release.
Rank #4
- Factory sealed DVD
Where to watch
Sony Pictures Classics announces a US opening in select cities on January 8, 2027. That is a US theatrical release announcement, not a complete international schedule. The film is described as Persian-language, and Métropole Films lists an English-subtitled theatrical version. No streaming service or confirmed current digital rental listing is established by the available release information.
The International Documentary Association’s September 2026 event listing documents a screening and Q&A with Ahangarani; it does not establish ongoing public availability. The association describes this as her first feature documentary.
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Rehearsals for a Revolution is most compelling in the way it makes political history tangible: through the family footage, recorded voices and remembered lives that official timelines can leave behind. Its five portraits bring intimacy and emotional weight to a history of protest and repression, while the range of archive materials gives the essay room to shift between personal recollection and public upheaval. This is a haunting, thoughtful documentary about how history lives on in the people who carry it.
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