By Pamela Ezell / LA Film Fest Guest Blogger

The award-winning filmmaker Nahid Persson Sarvestani brings a dark and difficult chapter of her life to light in her latest film, My Stolen Revolution. In the late ‘70s in Iran, Persson Sarvestani was a Marxist engaged in the struggle against the shah. After the revolution and the rise of Khomeini, she fled Iran, narrowly escaping imprisonment. But she left behind many comrades, including a younger brother, who was executed while keeping her whereabouts secret.

Many of these fellow activists were imprisoned, tortured and killed. Burdened with survivor’s guilt, Persson Sarvestani avoided looking too closely at this part of her life. What had happened to her friends? Who else survived and where were they now?

With the help of a daughter, who was just one year old when they fled Iran, she finds a handful of her women comrades. She visits one of the former leaders of the movement in San Francisco, only to find the woman is now an observant Muslim. “How can a communist convert to Islam?” she asks.

But Persson Sarvestani presses on, and she finds a group of women now living throughout Europe who, despite prison, rape, torture and brainwashing, are unbowed. She brings them together in the film to share their stories, which they do with a surprising amount of good humor and a lack of bitterness. One of the audience members asked, after the screening, how it was possible to have endured so much and not be angry. The filmmaker answered, “It doesn’t help if you are angry – you have to do something.”

The power of these women in the face of incredible opposition is astonishing, but the film is full of small, personal moments: delicious-looking shared meals, walks together in a snowy landscape, fragile works of art that were created in secret behind the prison walls. One of them has kept her prison blindfold and chador all of these years. Nothing is more powerful than the sight of each woman trying it on and then pulling it off as though she is being set free once more.

Persson Sarvestani was inspired to finally look more closely at this part of her life by the Green Revolution, saying “2009 was a repeat of what happened to us 30 years ago, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. This film is not only about what happened to us, but is about what is still happening in Iran right now.”

My Stolen Revolution screens at the LA Film Fest again tonight, June 19 at 7:10pm. Tickets available at the door, more information available here »