The documentary "Taraneh": a refreshing breath for the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution

What he says

An English translation of the talk, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

0:01 Hello. Friday, 5 Dey 1404, December 26, 2025. The documentary "Taraneh," about Taraneh Alidoosti, made by Pegah Ahangarani, a film actress and director and a friend of Taraneh Alidoosti, triggered a wave of support within Iranian society after it was broadcast by BBC Persian. In fact, this documentary brought the collective memory of the people back to the fore through the words of one of the heroes of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and it rebuilt and refreshed in the public mind the importance of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution, which, in a sense,

1:02 is a deep revolution under the skin of Iranian society, in our cultural and social affairs, one that also shook the pillars of the country's politics. In these intimate and unpretentious remarks, Taraneh Alidoosti also offers an account of her life, which can rightly be considered this artist's finest work. An artist whose life is itself a masterpiece, and in fact one could say she has created true art in the way she lives her own life.

1:58 This cultured and accomplished woman, who, in addition to acting in cinema, also works in translation and writing, recounts in this documentary her own arrest during the Jina revolution, how she went to prison, the support the prisoners gave her, and also the matter of her illness, which kept her mostly housebound for a year. It is an illness she contracted in prison, and many suspect it is due to medications she was given there, whether deliberately, by mistake, or as a side effect of certain drugs. In any case, it is a skin disease in which the immune system attacks the skin from the top of the head to the toes.

2:57 In any case, after her recovery, this is the first time Taraneh Alidoosti has sat in front of a camera. Fortunately, the effects of her illness have gone, and her skin is healthy. In her remarks, after 25 years of acting, which she began at the age of 15, appearing in more than 20 brilliant films, Taraneh Alidoosti firmly insists that she will no longer go in front of the camera with compulsory hijab. She can now be called the best spokesperson of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution, a revolution that is unfolding deeply in the realm of culture and society, under the skin of our society. And Ms.

3:59 Alidoosti rightly points out that art cannot lag behind the people and that the artist must be with the people. Perhaps one could even say that avant-garde, pioneering artists in a way move ahead of the people and draw the people along behind them. In any case, it must be said that in an atmosphere where the regime was trying to spread the dust of despair over society, by highlighting divisions among political opponents or through the crackdown it carried out in Mashhad at the seventh-day memorial ceremony for Khosrow Alikordi, and to keep the people, whom the regime

4:55 tries to keep frightened, isolated from one another, and hopeless, this interview with Ms. Alidoosti should be regarded, one could say, as an injection of courage, hope, and momentum into the people. But for now, the regime's organs have stayed silent, except for the Student News Agency, affiliated with the Basij Organization, which, as usual, since these gentlemen judge everyone by their own standards, and whenever they want to go after someone they brand them with financial corruption, dependence on foreigners, spying for foreigners, and the like.

5:52 This piece by the Student News Agency was in that same vein, something that, from having been repeated so often against opponents and dissidents, must be called threadbare, and certainly no one among the people takes such things seriously. For years now, the regime has in fact lost the battle of narratives, and the narratives the regime offers about any event are miles apart from what the people take from it. Perhaps at one time these claims held some appeal for some of their own circle, their own audience within the regime, or built narratives for them, whereas one can say that

6:46 today such writings and narrative-building no longer convince even the regime's followers, who make up less than 8 percent of society. Now, three documents from the US National Archives, which had been in the George W. Bush Library, were released at the request of George Washington University, which had asked that these documents be made available to the university. Normally, classified documents become eligible for release after 25 or 35 years, but with the approval of the US National Archives, Mr. George W. Bush's library

7:44 placed these classified documents at the disposal of George Washington University, and the university published them. These three documents contain three private conversations of Mr. George W. Bush, during his presidency, in the years 1380, 1384 and 1387 [2001, 2005 and 2008], with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, about Iran, their conversations about Iran. In the first document, in 1380, Putin in effect tips Bush off that the Islamic Republic is seeking to build a nuclear weapon and in effect promises that Russia will not go along with or cooperate with it.

8:40 In the second document, from 1384, a meeting of the two presidents at the White House, Bush says that he wants to take the case of Iran's nuclear weapons to the UN Security Council, especially after the Islamic Republic broke the seals at the Isfahan UCF. Mr. Putin asks that diplomacy be given time and says he is afraid it will become another North Korea and slip out of control. That is not in this document, but later we see that Mr. Bush takes the nuclear case to the Security Council, and Russia goes along, cooperates, and votes for it.

9:31 It is in this same meeting that Mr. Bush states that Iran's leaders are religious lunatics who must not have nuclear weapons, and Putin agrees. Take note, Mr. Khamenei, who has long since put the collar of servitude, slavery, and following Putin around his own neck: see that in Mr. Putin's eyes you are a religious lunatic. Also, in this conversation Mr. Putin says that, on a trip he made to Tehran, some of these religious lunatics actually have university educations as well. Probably his meetings with Haddad-Adel and Ahmadinejad prompted him to make that remark.

10:32 In the third document, a meeting of the two presidents in Sochi, Russia, in 1387, Mr. Bush thanks Putin for delaying the delivery of the S-300 defense system, and Mr. Putin says, yes, they paid three years ago, but for now we are not delivering it, it's an obligation. And as we know, they in fact dragged it out for years, and even though the Islamic Republic had paid for the S-400, they never delivered it later either; they gave it to Turkey, and in the end they delivered the S-300 to Iran with a hundred ifs and buts, a system whose radar sites were destroyed in Israel's attack.

11:30 Meanwhile, the HRANA news agency, in a report it has published on 2025, shows that this year, whose final days we are now living through, the number of executions carried out in Iran by the Islamic Republic has reached more than 1,922 people, which represents a 100 percent increase over the previous year. In hope of victory for Iran and Iranians.