AFI Fest Review: Rehearsals for a Revolution Weaves the Personal and Political With Complicated Results

Rehearsals for a Revolution sits squarely within the personal memoir documentary’s wheelhouse, filtering Iran’s recent history through the more intimate memories of those closest to its filmmaker, Pegah Ahangarani. We begin with Ahangarani’s father, who, having fought valiantly in the revolution, finds himself disillusioned with its leadership once it takes power.

Ahangarani’s characterization of her father is almost exclusively through the eyes of the child she was at the time, and her narration likewise idolizes him, frequently repeating just how great a soldier he was. Legend has it, she narrates, that Saddam Hussein personally offered Iran prized military equipment for her father—an offer Iran refused. Ahangarani doesn’t get into the weeds regarding truth via myth in this chapter. She leaves that for the audience to consider. Having made a previous documentary short about her father, Ahangarani weaves his tale with confidence.

The chapters that follow never reach the heights of this first one. An early story about a schoolteacher Ahangarani idolizes is compelling on its own, but feels oddly disconnected from the rest of the narrative. Later, we learn her mother was a prominent film director in Iran, which gave Ahangarani exposure to film sets and acting. Ahangarani explains that she was hesitant to include a chapter on her uncle Rashid due to the lack of archival material, noting that she had only three photographs and 22 seconds of Super 8mm film. This fourth-wall break brings the making of the film into focus, anticipating a more reflective final segment that directly ponders documentary ethics.

Ahangarani’s instincts regarding the uncle segment make sense—a reliance on the palpable texture of worn photographs and grainy film footage is among Rehearsals‘ standouts. The sound design reinforces this tactile quality, the mechanical whirrs of VHS tapes and film reels granting archival materials a physical presence. At one point, when describing her father seeing Khomeini at a parade, he swears that he looked directly at him. A freeze-frame reveals a face just grainy enough to neither confirm nor deny her father’s potential tall tale. As the film pushes towards the present day, iPhone footage of protests, by contrast, possesses a digital sheen that shifts the memory-based storytelling of the earlier segments into something more immediate and less elusive.

The final act begins with Ahangarani staring at a blank Adobe Premiere screen, uneasy about going through footage of the deadly protests in early 2026. Her narration ponders the ethics of showing the massacre of her fellow Iranians, especially when she harbors the guilt of leaving Iran years ago. She scrolls through protest footage, the thumbnails ominously blurred. Brief shots appear, including one showing rows of body bags, but she is careful never to linger on them.

Documentary filmmakers have long debated whether images of atrocities should be shown, from Claude Lanzmann’s reluctance to use archival footage of the Holocaust to Georges Didi-Huberman’s defense of its historical importance. Onscreen text cites a death toll of 6,000, acknowledging how difficult it is to establish an accurate figure under a totalitarian regime. While footage can never relay the full extent of what happened, it can make the violence harder to ignore.

This text also points out the subsequent joint American-Israeli attack on Iran in 2026. Though the film doesn’t explicitly draw a connection between the two, their proximity suggests a relationship between the protests and the attack that Rehearsals doesn’t take time to meaningfully interrogate.

Alongside You Can See Everything and Possible Love, Rehearsals for a Revolution joins a growing wave of directors interested in the ethics and limitations of documentary cinema. But Ahangarani’s film is ultimately most effective when Iran’s history is filtered through her family stories, becoming less convincing when her own feelings about having left Iran take center stage.

Rehearsals for a Revolution screened at 2026 AFI Fest and opens on January 8 following a December awards-qualifying run.