One Must Wash Eyes is among a roster of 32 feature-length and short films screening at the festival
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
GEMFest
When she emigrated from Iran at 19, North Vancouver director Sepideh Yadegar didn’t have her sights set on filmmaking.
“I came to be a doctor,” said Yadegar, whose debut feature film One Must Wash Eyes opens this year’s GEMFest. “But when I was going through my refugee claim in 2012, I realized that medicine was not my calling.”
Already politically active on social media, she decided on a change of course.
“I thought, I can tell stories that speak about the same subjects rather than talking about these issues directly. My parents were telling me, ‘Stop doing what you’re doing.’ So that was my solution.”
A drama leavened with comedic and playful stylistic touches, One Must Wash Eyes is among a roster of 32 feature-length and short films screening at the festival.
Other features include Seeds, a bloody Indigenous revenge thriller; Swing and Sway, a feminist documentary set during the pandemic; Analogue Revolution, a history of Canadian feminist media; and NiiMisSak: Sisters in Film, about First Nations women filmmakers. Along with the films, which include 23 from Canada and 11 from B.C.-based creators, the festival hosts panels and other events.
Now in its 20th year, GEMFest (a.k.a. Gender Equity in Media Festival) is the only film festival dedicated to women and gender-diverse people in Western Canada.
In Yadegar’s One Must Wash Eyes, an Iranian international student in Vancouver named Sahar participates in a 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protest. After a photo of her at the demonstration appears in a local newspaper, the Iranian authorities crack down on her family back home. Cut off from tuition funds, Sahar has to choose between a new life in Canada or returning to her homeland.
Yadegar began working on the script in 2020 but had the idea years earlier, while a student at Emily Carr.
“I wanted to make a movie about an international student,” she said. “It was originally more inspired by my life story, but then we updated it to make it more relevant after the 2022 murder of Mahsa Amini and the uprising that followed.”
She shot the film in Vancouver with a cast of 26, including 11 Iranian Canadian actors. Iranian-born Toronto actor Pegah Ghafoori, whose credits include the MGM+ series From, plays Sahar. Other cast members include Sean Depner (Riverdale), Mitra Lohrasbi (DC’s Legends of Tomorrow) and Chilton Crane (Supernatural). The movie’s title comes from a poem by 20th century Iranian poet/painter Sohrab Sepehri.
The film cut close to home for Ghafoori.
“A photo of my aunt at one of these protests appeared in a newspaper, and she also got in a lot of trouble because of it,” said the actor.
“I had no idea that had happened until after we finished filming. But the whole time that we were filming, the story felt so close to my heart. My family has always been very outspoken about like human rights and women’s rights. Being an Iranian woman, this story felt, in a way, like I was marching on a street, chanting. We’re telling every Iranian girl’s story.”
Yadegar notes that many of the scenes in the film are problematic by the standards of the Islamic Republic. And she realized while scouting for locations that they might be problematic here, too.
“We needed a Persian grocery store, and I was walking into all the stores in North Vancouver and elsewhere, asking for help, not knowing if who I was talking to was pro- or anti-government. I was putting myself out there. And I realized, this is not normal. Not everyone goes through that while making a film.”