‘Don’t Be Afraid’: How Schoolgirls in Iran Helped Fuel a Protest Movement
Last September, after the death in Iranian police custody of a young woman, Mahsa Zhina Amini, who had been accused of not adhering to the Iranian regime’s strict dress code, 16-year-olds Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh joined protests over the government’s treatment of women and girls that were sweeping across the country.
Amid a brutal crackdown on protesters by Iranian authorities, neither Shakarami nor Esmailzadeh made it home.
As the above excerpt from the new FRONTLINE documentary Inside the Iranian Uprising explores, something remarkable happened as news of the teenagers’ deaths spread. Schoolgirls across the country began holding protests of their own — including defacing pictures of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a crime under Iranian law — and filming and sharing the footage online.
“Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid,” young students chant in a clip that appears in the above excerpt. “We’re all in this together.”
“If we are not united, we will be destroyed one by one,” students chant in another clip, tossing their mandatory hijabs into the air as they hold images of Shakarami and Amini.
The schoolgirl protests were part of the larger women’s rights and antigovernment movement that rocked Iran starting last fall, putting the country’s leaders under unprecedented pressure. As Inside the Iranian Uprising explores, human rights groups estimate that more than 500 Iranians have been killed in the crackdown on protests that followed Amini’s death, among them 72 children — including Shakarami and Esmailzadeh. Iranian authorities denied wrongdoing in the two teen girls’ deaths, which came just days apart, claiming they died related to falls from buildings. But eyewitnesses told local activists Esmailzadeh was beaten to death with police batons, and Shakarami’s death certificate stated that she died due to multiple injuries caused by the impact of a hard object.
“The Islamic Republic themselves and the Revolutionary Guard Corps killed Nika,” Shakarami’s mother says in the documentary.
In investigating the crackdown and making Inside the Iranian Uprising, FRONTLINE gathered and reviewed over 100 hours of footage filmed by protesters, cross-checked it with testimony from eyewitnesses and protestors, and spoke to activists and exiles who have been gathering evidence of human rights violations.
Among them is Shiva Nazarahari, a human rights activist who was jailed four times in Iran, and who shares her perspective on the schoolgirl protests in the above clip.
“It seems this generation doesn’t have the fear that mine and the one before me had. They are less fearful,” Nazarahari says. “They have learnt to be brave, to fight for their rights. This lifestyle is forced upon us and this generation won’t accept it. My generation tolerated it, but ‘Gen-Z’ cannot.”
For the full story, watch Inside the Iranian Uprising. The documentary is a gripping window into the protest movement that rocked Iran after Amini’s death and the lengths to which the Iranian regime — which has called the protests a plot by the country’s enemies — went to put the movement down.
Inside the Iranian Uprising will be available to stream starting Thu., June 29, 2023, at 7/6c at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. The documentary will have its broadcast premiere Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023 on PBS stations (check local listings). Inside the Iranian Uprising is a Passion Pictures production for GBH/FRONTLINE in association with BBC and RAI. The producer and director is Majed Neisi. The producer is Sasha Joelle Achilli. The senior producer is Dan Edge. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
