Rehearsals for a Revolution: Pegah Ahangarani Brings Her Documentary to TIFF 2026
Five Portraits, Five Forms of Resistance
The structure of Rehearsals for a Revolution revolves around five portraits.
Each person represents a different relationship with resistance, memory and Iranian history.
Cannes describes the film as five portraits of loved ones and five experiences of resistance. The festival notes that the chapters focus on different people in Ahangarani’s life, including her father and a literature teacher.
This chapter-based structure allows the documentary to move between different generations and perspectives.
A father can represent one relationship with history.
A teacher can represent another.
A relative who experienced political imprisonment can introduce another perspective.
Together, these individual stories create a larger mosaic.
The result is not a single-person biography. It is a multi-generational portrait.
That structure also allows Ahangarani to explore the difference between how historical events are remembered by individuals who experienced them directly and how those events are remembered by later generations.
A Family Story and a National Story
At its heart, Rehearsals for a Revolution is built around a connection between family history and national history.
Ahangarani’s own life is inseparable from the historical period explored by the documentary.
She was born in 1984, several years after the 1979 revolution. Her childhood and adolescence therefore unfolded during a period when the revolution and its aftermath were already part of the political and cultural environment of everyday life.
The film allows her to look back at that history through the people who surrounded her.
The result is a generational perspective.
The documentary asks, implicitly, what happens when the history of a country becomes part of the history of a family.
Political changes affect where people live.
Wars affect families.
Restrictions affect careers.
Protests affect relationships.
Migration changes identities.
Memories become fragmented.
And stories that cannot always be told publicly can survive through private recordings, family photographs and personal testimony.
This is one reason archival material is so important to the film.
September 22, 2026 | 11:05 am
