In the final shots of 'And How Miserable is the Home of Evil' (Saleh Kashefi, 2023), we see Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, curled up in his seat, one hand to his face, dejected, awaiting his imminent defeat. While the camera closes and opens the frame to show different angles of the ayatollah's afflicted body, the sounds of protests are heard in the background like echoes resounding in his consciousness, the exclamations of the people who have come determined to cut off the oppressor's head. The noise of the demonstrations gradually permeates the scene in a sort of progressive materialization of the forces that now threaten the tyrannic order. A voice announces: "There he is!" and just at that moment the film ends.

'And How Miserable…' is presented as an in situ documentary reportage on the (future) fall of the dictatorial regime. Iranian artist Saleh Kashefi, currently exiled in Switzerland, manages to subvert, in this forceful film essay, the representation that the Islamic clerical power imposes.

To make this film, the director appropriated some videos from Ali Khamenei's official website, where records of his speeches and public interventions are archived. This is political propaganda aimed at intensifying the symbolic legitimacy of the regime. The filmmaker subjects these videos to a forceful process of re-signification. Once they have been processed for 'And How Miserable...', these recordings favor the dismantling of the Iranian ideological veil.

But Kashefi not only undertakes an exercise of (re) editing archives. His tactic is to contaminate these images with recordings of citizen protests that have taken place in his country in recent years. Among others, he uses sound recordings of the demonstrations unleashed after the death of young Mahsa Amini by the Islamic religious police. Videos of some of these events can be found on the Instagram profile @1500tasvir. More sound footage is used from other sites or virtual channels, such as @blackfishvoice, whose description reads: "We are not neutral, we are on the side of the oppressed". Such virtual spaces serve as support for civil actions, and the content they gather is a testimony of that reality that the narrative of power pretends to suppress. In ‘And How Miserable…', the sound files emanating from those spaces constitute a virus that destroys the political fantasy fueled by the videos on Ali Khamenei's website.

Like Peter Watkins in ‘The War Game’, the Iranian artist builds a documentary fiction/ a chronicle of the future with which he participates, undeniably, in the civic confrontation with the Islamic regime; a confrontation against repression and moral surveillance, against the abuse of power and the intensification of poverty.

I say Watkins' way, not only because Kashefi transmutes these archives into the reportage of journalists covering the unfolding events there - just as the English director's lens in 'The War Game' reports the catastrophe caused by a nuclear attack in Kent, UK. If at any point 'And How Miserable...' continues the legacy of Peter Watkins, it is in underlining - in its prospection of the future, which manipulates the archive through the direct and expository style of reportage - how images are by no means innocent, since, by removing them from their predetermined frames of meaning, the hegemony of their (apparent) truth can be removed.

Director Sergei Loznitsa, an exceptional master of archival work and compilation documentaries, commented in an interview that only ethics differentiates documentaries from fiction. This documentary fiction designed by Kashefi does not place its truth in a genre, nor in the events it narrates, but in the significance (social, political, historical) of its discourse.

The violence of the sound that bursts into the mosque where the supreme leader has been cornered in those last shots of the film is the disturbing violence of historical justice. In just seven minutes, the filmmaker resolves an intervention in these images of Iranian Islamic power that, like in a paranoid painting by Salvador Dalí, invert their symbolic charge.