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In recent months videos of women in Iran riding motorbikes, dancing in the streets, and defying mandatory hijab laws have been popping up across social media. It seems that three years after the ‘Women, life, freedom’ movement swept across the country, women’s lives have been transformed. But is this the real picture?
Photographer Kiana Hyeri recently visited for the first time in three years. She says she was amazed at the number of women in Tehran, the country’s capital, with bare heads and crop tops. Especially because the protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, picked up by the morality police for infractions of the hijab law had been so brutally repressed.
But, Deepa Parent tells Annie Kelly that doesn’t mean that life in Iran has got easier for women. After the war with Israel, spiralling economic problems and a water crisis the regime is cracking down hard on all forms of dissent – with more executions than any other country. “To see these young people who are fully aware of how risky it is to go out on the streets and sing and how risky it is to continue resisting, I just think they’ve reached a point that they are ready to pay the price on whatever it takes.”
