While the world scrolls past viral spectacle, Tehran’s bullet-ridden streets run with blood, protesters fall and fear suffocates the city.
Iran’s creative community has borne the brunt of tyranny for decades. Directors, actors, writers and musicians have been jailed, exiled or silenced simply for telling their stories or advocating for freedom. Families are terrorized for being connected to those who dare to make art. It bears repeating that women, who are second-class citizens in Iran, do not have the right to sing for public audiences; girls as young as nine can be legally married as long as a judge and father approve; the courts offer no justice for women, LGBTQ people or dissenters. Artistic freedom has been treated as a crime, democracy a threat.
These are not abstract human rights violations. They are crimes against humanity, systematic, deliberate and escalating. In the past month alone, the crackdown has reached unimaginable levels: protesters shot in the streets, bodies sometimes alive still placed in bags, jailhouse torture and mysterious deaths after release. Organs have been reportedly removed in hospitals under duress, and women are routinely raped or executed for speaking their truth. Silence in the face of such horror is complicity.
Hollywood and the global creative community cannot claim neutrality. The silence of many film industry figures who have spoken out about other crises and crackdowns around the word — from Tibet to South Africa, Ukraine to Palestine — has not gone unnoticed. When Iranian directors like Jafar Panahi are sentenced to prison, when actors are silenced, and the world continues to scroll past, we are complicit. Advocacy is our responsibility; neutrality is not an option. We are living through a consequential moment in history. The citizens of Iran are suffocating under an iron fist, and the world must speak collectively. This travesty cannot continue. Regime change — the explicit aim of the protests — is not merely a political argument; it is a moral imperative. To remain silent is to condone blood on the streets, to condone the execution of artists, the silencing of women, the theft of childhoods and the erasure of human dignity.
I left Iran when I was four, yet some memories cling: the smell of the streets, the chatter of families at the beaches where men and women were allowed to sunbathe side by side, the hum of a city alive with ideas. That city, vibrant, westernized yet steeped in tradition was so palpably eager to grow alongside the modern world. Arriving in America, I was confronted with a markedly different reality. Around the time of the hostage crisis, Iran was declared part of an “Axis of Evil,” well before George W. Bush invoked the term. I was mercilessly bullied for being Iranian, even though my Jewish Iranian family had escaped.
It goes without saying that the majority of Iranians who remained inside the country were not complicit in the regime’s evils; they were ordinary people living under a tyrannical theocracy that slowly turned back the clock to medieval times, crushing freedoms and suffocating creativity. Women were and are still forced to cover their heads, adhere to strict dress codes and live under constant surveillance — a stark contrast to the vibrant laughter and ordinary life I remembered from my childhood.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is said to have been inspired in part from the 1979 revolution. It imagines a society where tyranny strips women of autonomy and freedom. Yet even her darkest visions pale compared to the reality in Iran today, where women are jailed, tortured and executed simply for speaking out, and entire communities live under constant fear. These atrocities demand more than fleeting headlines or idle outrage; they require sustained global attention and solidarity. The creative community of directors, writers, artists and storytellers worldwide should stand with Iranian citizens, amplifying their voices, defending their art and refusing to remain neutral. To do otherwise is to accept a world in which tyranny continues to crush both culture and humanity.
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