Between Revolutions (2023)
Between Revolutions is a genuinely powerful and intelligent piece of work, and one I admired more than I was always able to lose myself in. Vlad Petri's documentary is a quietly ambitious thing: a history of two uprisings, the Iranian revolution against the Shah and the Romanian revolution against Ceaușescu, told entirely through the friendship of two women caught up in both. It is a striking idea, and for anyone drawn to the history it will resonate deeply. Three stars.
The conceit is elegant. Zahra and Maria meet as students in Bucharest in the 1970s and, once separated by geography and upheaval, keep their bond alive through letters. Those letters are the film's spine, read in voiceover as the years and the revolutions roll on, and they carry its whole emotional and political weight. It is worth knowing that this is a documentary-fiction hybrid: the letters were written for the film by Petri and Lavinia Braniște, while everything you see on screen is real. That blend of invented intimacy and genuine history is the film's cleverest trick.
And what you see is remarkable. The entire film unfolds against a backdrop of archival footage, and the images Petri has unearthed are often extraordinary, ordinary people in the streets, women at the heart of movements that would later try to erase them, the raw texture of two nations remaking themselves. Told through the eyes of women who lived through both upheavals, it lends the history a real intimacy and force. It is powerful, and at its best it is genuinely moving.
My reservation is one of variety. The film commits so completely to its single form, letters over archive, archive under letters, that after a while the register begins to flatten. There is little visual or tonal shift to break the rhythm, and a piece that is intellectually gripping can start to feel, in stretches, as though it is delivering its power in one unchanging key. A little more variation, a change of pace or texture, might have let the emotion land even harder than it does.
That is really a question of audience. If you have roots in Iran or Romania, or a genuine interest in this history, Between Revolutions will speak to you strongly, and it deserves to. It is a serious, respectful and often stirring act of remembrance, and its focus on women as the beating heart of both revolutions is pointed and welcome. For the more general viewer coming in cold, though, there may not be quite enough of a foothold, and the film's formal purity, so much of its strength, can also keep you at arm's length.
Three stars. Between Revolutions is a thoughtful, powerful and quietly angry film that does something bold with the documentary form and mostly pulls it off. It rewards patience and prior interest more than it courts a wide audience, but for the right viewer it is a haunting and worthwhile watch. I came away admiring its craft and its conviction, and thinking about those two women, and the freedoms they fought for, long after it had ended.
Reviewed as part of the Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival, where Between Revolutions screens.
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