Stir Q&A: At GEMFest, One Must Wash Eyes takes a nuanced look at Women, Life, Freedom protests
Director Sepideh Yadegar’s debut feature follows Iranian international student Sahar as she stands up for women’s rights in Vancouver
One Must Wash Eyes.
GEMFest presents One Must Wash Eyes at the VIFF Centre on March 5 at 6 pm
“ONE MUST SEE differently,” a voice narrates in One Must Wash Eyes, Iranian-Canadian filmmaker Sepideh Yadegar’s feature debut.
It’s a message that really drives home the film’s themes. When Sahar Jebelli, an Iranian international student in Vancouver, is photographed attending a local Women, Life, Freedom protest following Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022, her face ends up in a Canadian newspaper, catalyzing a chain of events that puts herself and her family at risk. Without giving too much away, it prompts some serious reflection on how people’s actions can affect others.
Yadegar’s feature is coming to the VIFF Centre on March 5 for the sold-out opening night of the 20th-annual GEMFest (Gender Equity in Media Festival). Running to March 9, the festival champions women and gender-diverse filmmakers, with 32 titles from nine countries screening this year.
In One Must Wash Eyes, there’s a certain relatability to Sahar (played by Pegah Ghafoori) for young adults trying to make it in the world today. Suddenly cut off from her uncle’s financial support and in dire need of enough money to continue her university education without losing her student visa, she takes up odd-end cash jobs, bagging groceries in a store run by an Iranian family, house sitting, and pruning plants at an unlicensed marijuana grow-op for a woman named Babu. She’s seen checking in with her mom by video call and smoking cigarettes to quell her anxiety.
While the film deals with some heavy subject matter, there is also levity in director Yadegar’s artistic choices. Sahar is often seen gently scolding a young girl who—despite not looking a day over 10—is a graffiti artist in the making. She scampers around the city alone with a can of spray paint in hand, tagging white fences and concrete walls with lopsided smiley faces, pulling down the bandana covering her mouth to suck on neon-blue lollipops. Elsewhere, Yadegar herself makes a few subtle appearances in the film as a woman dancing freely in a red dress, hair swirling around her and arms raised to the sky.
There’s also undercurrents of a coming-of-age romance here. Sahar gets hit on at work by a handsome young Iranian man named Majid (Navid Charkhi), who takes her on a very Vancouver-appropriate hiking date with a picnic lunch of PBCJ sandwiches (peanut butter and carrot jam, his mom’s specialty); but she kills the vibe when she asks him to lend her money. And when a photographer named Matt (Sean Depner) sees Sahar writing feminist blog posts about Iran’s oppressive laws, their lives become intertwined in an unimaginably complicated way—but no spoilers.
Through it all, there’s the reminder that Sahar is taking some serious risks to stand up for women’s rights. Although the specifics of One Must Wash Eyes may be fictional, the film also captures true events from a very nuanced angle.
Ahead of the feature’s GEMFest screening, Stir connected with Yadegar to learn a bit more about her work.
Sepideh Yadegar on set of One Must Wash Eyes. Photo by Michèle Bygodt
There seem to be many parallels between Sahar’s life and your own, especially in terms of your background moving to Canada from Iran with a passion for the arts but familial pressure to pursue a career in medicine. How did your own experiences inform the character of Sahar?
I like to think of Sahar as a cooler, bolder, and more rebellious version of myself. At the start of the film, she is living her family’s dream of becoming a doctor, but deep down, she is searching for something that truly feels like her own. We see glimpses of that in the way she expresses herself through her blog and in the moment she asks Babu about the grow-op, whether she enjoys what she does. Those moments show that, even if she does not have all the answers yet, she is starting to question the path that has been laid out for her.
My own journey was not as direct as Sahar’s. I went from pursuing medicine to briefly considering law, then graphic design, then industrial design. Then I took one film course, and everything changed. That was when I knew I had found my path. I hope Sahar gets there too.
A local newspaper shows a photo of Sahar attending a Women, Life, Freedom protest in One Must Wash Eyes.
The film includes news footage of the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, and Sahar is also shown at a protest downtown in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Can you describe what it was like to film that day? Why was it important for you to show this movement from an angle specific to Vancouver?
Vancouver is home to a large Persian community, and I did not fully realize that until the Women, Life, Freedom protests happened in the city. Seeing thousands of Persians filling the streets, raising their voices, demanding change, and calling Mahsa’s name over and over was incredibly powerful. No amount of set decoration or background could have brought that kind of life into the scene.
It was pouring rain that day, which is not unusual for Vancouver, but it created a moody and revolutionary atmosphere that was exactly what we needed for Sahar’s moment of defiance. I have to give credit to our amazing crew for being so flexible and not worrying about getting soaked. And, of course, to our incredible star Pegah Ghafoori, whose performance brought so much raw emotion and authenticity to the scene.
At one point, Matt tells Sahar that he thinks it’s “cool” to shine a light on oppression. What kind of commentary is being made here about how acts of protest are seen around the world, particularly in Canada?
Oh, Matt. A lot of times, we follow trends without fully understanding their nuances. It is not necessarily our fault, because we are constantly exposed to so much information all at once, and we rarely take the time to process or research it properly. But for people like Matt, what he sees as “cool” comes at a devastating cost. It costs people their lives, their freedom, and their homes. We are adaptable creatures by nature, but in places like Iran, where there is no freedom of speech, people do not protest because they are bored or looking for something to do. They do it out of necessity.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with someone about refugee families who fled on a dinghy with their children. That person called them irresponsible, bad parents, without acknowledging that the chance of survival back home was almost nonexistent. What if getting on that dinghy, as terrifying as it was, was still a better choice than staying?
When people protest in countries that silence them, imprison them, or kill them for speaking out, it is never about being trendy or “cool”. It is about survival.
One Must Wash Eyes.
There is a lot of artistry in the film that both balances and emphasizes its political themes, particularly when it comes to the shots of a woman dancing. What is the symbolism behind those scenes?
The dancer was always part of the script from the very first draft. This script went through countless edits, and yet she remained. In the beginning, I did not fully understand why she was there. I just saw her dancing everywhere, so I let her be. Then, after Mahsa Jina Amini’s murder, I saw a drawing that spread across the internet. In it, Mahsa was wearing her traditional Kurdish red dress, her hand raised, inviting all the women who had been murdered in the movement to dance with her. In that chilling moment, I realized why the dancer had been in the script all along.
One Must Wash Eyes really emphasizes the need to pause and think about how your actions might affect others. How does the title relate to that idea—and how can viewers carry that awareness into their own lives?
The title of the film comes from a famous poem by Sohrab Sepehri, which encourages people to see the world from a different perspective. At its core, it is a call for empathy. There is a lot of binary thinking in our world, and we often struggle to acknowledge everything in between, the complexities and nuances that shape reality. What the title, the film, and the poem all suggest is the need to peel away the layers that cloud our vision and look at the world with fresh eyes. Nothing is purely black and white. The more we recognize that, the more we can approach others with understanding and empathy. 
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