Mehran Tamadon’s documentary My Worst Enemy attempts to explore autocracy in Iran through re-enactments of interrogation and torture by former political prisoners. The Iranian-born, French-based filmmaker, who was himself detained and questioned by authorities in 2012, gathered fellow exiles to recreate their harrowing experiences, hoping to provoke introspection and empathy among their former tormentors.
However, the film’s approach has been criticised as naive. The role-playing scenarios, set in abandoned Paris buildings, lack the real stakes of the actual torture and abduction endured by the exiles over months or years. The re-enactments conclude in hours, failing to capture the profound trauma of state violence.
The film gains political weight when Zar Amir Ebrahimi, star of Holy Spider, joins as an intelligence officer. Her incisive questioning exposes ethical flaws in Tamadon’s method, including the risk of re-traumatising victims. The tense two-day session, captured in intimate handheld footage, becomes the film’s core, turning My Worst Enemy into a self-interrogation about the limits of cinema in analysing systematic abuse.
