News

Concern is rising among friends of a Montreal-based documentary filmmaker who was arrested 3 1/2 months ago in her native Iran and is under virtual house arrest.

Mehrnoushe Solouki, a doctoral student at the University of Quebec at Montreal, was arrested on Feb. 19 and put in solitary confinement for a month at Tehran's notorious Evin prison, accused of threatening Iran's national security. She arrived in Iran in December to film a documentary about repression in the country in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.

(Zahra Kazemi, a 54-year-old Iranian-Canadian photographer, was beaten to death at Ervin prison in 2003.)

Ms. Solouki was released after bail of $115,000 (U.S.) was posted, but her passport was seized and she can't leave the country.

Ms. Solouki, 38, has both French and Iranian citizenship, but the Iranian authorities do not recognize dual nationality and French embassy officials have had no luck getting her permission to leave the country.

This week, Reporters Without Borders and three human-rights groups called for Iran to lift travel bans against Ms. Solouki and Parnaz Azima, an American-Iranian reporter for Radio Free Europe whose U.S. passport was seized in January.

The human-rights groups also called for the release of two other Iranian Americans, Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, and Kian Tajbakhsh, a social scientist who consulted for the Iranian government. Both were arrested in May.

“These measures appear to be an attempt by Iran's security authorities to sow fear into the wider community of journalists, writers, scholars and activists,” the groups said.

Ms. Solouki's predicament has caused consternation in Montreal, where she has lived for the past two years, pursuing film studies and working on documentaries.

“I'm very worried because I haven't heard anything directly from her,” said filmmaker Denis McCready, who has known Ms. Solouki for the past couple of years. “The allegations against her are very murky. … Endangering the Iranian state? How does one do that with a little video camera?”

Mr. McCready last spoke to Ms. Solouki in December, before she left for Iran. In mid-April, Mr. McCready received an e-mail from a friend of Ms. Solouki living in Tehran, recounting how she was arrested after leaving the office of a colleague and that the home of her parents, where she had been staying, was searched “from top to bottom.”

During her month at Evin prison, she was repeatedly interrogated and forced to fill out hundreds of pages explaining the reasons for her film project “under relentless glare of neon light, deprived of everything,” the e-mail said.

The e-mail hints at abuse, noting that Ms. Solouki's parents are anxious for her to be allowed to leave Iran so that “she might slowly regain the physical and psychological health she lost in just a few weeks.”

Also following the case closely is Olivier Asselin, who teaches history of art and film studies at University of Montreal.

Ms. Solouki took a course with Prof. Asselin a couple of years ago. Prof. Asselin said he was impressed by a documentary she had shot in Iran that consisted of asking young Iranians what they thought of America.

“These young people were very open-minded and very knowledgeable of American culture … but what is obvious in the film is that they were afraid to talk in public space.”