On a rainy winter afternoon in 2001, Mehdi Mahmoudian, a political dissident in Tehran, noticed a man with an amputated hand struggling to repair his car. Mahmoudian, who was in his twenties, worked in a nearby print shop. He immediately recognized the man as a former guard who had used his left hand to torture Mahmoudian in Towhid Prison two years earlier.
Mahmoudian decided to help his torturer. He invited the man into his shop, offered him tea, and recruited a co-worker to fix his car. Hours later, when the man was preparing to leave, Mahmoudian reintroduced himself as his former prisoner. Stunned, the man drove away without responding. But he returned to the print shop the next day and asked for Mahmoudian’s forgiveness. He said it was the fault of the authorities; he was just doing his job, and he regretted it.
The encounter bears striking parallels to the opening of the film “It Was Just an Accident,” which Mahmoudian co-wrote with the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. In an early scene, an auto mechanic named Vahid recognizes his former torturer by the distinctive squeak of his prosthetic leg. Vahid kidnaps the man, nicknamed Peg-Leg, in a white van, and collects a ragtag team of former detainees from across Tehran to try to certify his identity. The feature was shot over twenty-eight days, covertly, mostly within the confines of the van.
Mahmoudian and Panahi met in the notorious Evin House of Detention in 2022, while they were both serving sentences. Panahi told me that, over seven months, they became friends, and Mahmoudian even cared for him when he contracted COVID. Shortly before Panahi was released, Mahmoudian embraced him and whispered in his ear, “Don’t forget the guys in prison.”
Later, after Mahmoudian, too, was free, Panahi invited him to collaborate on a script that would draw on their collective experience in Iran’s prison system. The film encapsulates the plight of Iranians who have endured incarceration, interrogation, and torture at the hands of the Islamic Republic. But it also asks those same Iranians to empathize with their oppressors.
On January 31st, not long after his screenplay for “It Was Just an Accident” was nominated for an Oscar, Mahmoudian was arrested again. He had just signed a joint statement that blamed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for the killings and arrests of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets across the country. Mahmoudian was released on bail on February 17th, and spoke with me via video chat from his home in Tehran a few days ago. I reached him briefly on Saturday, hours after the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran; he said only that he was unharmed, then his signal cut out. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You were recently released from prison, on February 17th. How are you doing? How would you describe your condition right now?
To be honest, getting released from prison in this situation does not make me happy. In the past sixteen years, I’ve spent about nine years in prison. I’ve been arrested thirteen times, and I have been released from prison many times before.
All the prison sentences that I endured in the past were for the goal of having fewer people killed on the streets. Any acts of resistance done by myself, or by others for decades before me, were in order to stop the Islamic Republic before it could cause such bloodshed, and to either make it fall or to change it from within. Getting released from prison did not have any joy this time, because thousands of people were still in prison, and thousands of families are mourning the deaths of their loved ones. If I were to summarize it in one sentence: We’re not good.
Take us back to the moment when you were arrested.
I was at home with two friends. It was 2:30 A.M. Two of us were up, and one of us was sleeping. They opened the door very quickly, and before we could realize what was going on, within two or three seconds, they put a gun to my head and my friend’s head. The friend who was sleeping also had a gun put to his head—he woke up feeling the pressure of the gun. A team entered through the window, and six other people came in through the door. This was a so-called antiterrorism team that they had sent for us. We are just three political activists who have been living together—and besides writing and speaking, we have never had any other arms.
Can we name the other two activists?
Yes, of course. Their names are Abdollah Momeni and Vida Rabbani. We’re three of the seventeen people who signed this statement—known activists who gave a warning to the government before the protests, and said, “Do not kill people.” After the massacre, we issued this statement condemning the state. These are activists who are mostly inside Iran. Some of them are outside, but they’re still connected to the inside.
How were you treated during those weeks in prison? Can you describe some of your living conditions?
I think the way we were treated is not a good assessment of anything, because they know that we are recognized figures, and our names are out in the media, so they try to project a more humane form of treatment with us. But I would like to take this opportunity to tell you how they have treated others.
Please do tell me about other prisoners. But I would just like to know about your situation first—which prison was it?
The first one was in Chalus. The next one, Sari, was a high-security one. And the last one was Nowshahr, which is a very old prison that’s in bad condition—almost destroyed.
