Manuscripts Don't Burn

Perhaps the most chilling part of Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s latest film, a biting political indictment of the Islamic State of Iran, is the blank screen that appears at the end. So fearful were cast and crew of state reprisals for their contribution to political dissent that the film contains no credits. Manuscripts Don’t Burn was short entirely under the nose of the repressive state of Iran, Rasoulof defiantly ignoring his twenty-year ban from making films or travelling outside his country. Subsequently it was smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival where it was displayed to much critical acclaim. 

Rasoulof’s story focuses on two government hitmen, whose task it is to track down dissident intellectuals in order to ensure their torture, imprisonment and death sentence. One particular individual is of great importance to them and we soon discover it is because he threatens to publish a manuscript recounting a botched state-plan to assassinate an entire coach load of writers and intellectuals. The story is supposedly inspired by real events and, although Rasoulof has yet to specify which ones, the predominant theory is that the coach load represents to the so-called ‘Chain Murders’ of more than eighty Iranian intellectuals between 1988 and 1998. 

But if all this sounds like an over-worthy political lecture as opposed to a film, fear not. Rasoulof keeps the audience totally engaged with a film that is as much a political diatribe as a crackling, tightly-wound thriller. Neither are the hit men, Khosrow and Morteza, two-dimensional caricatures of state brutality. Khosrow’s mind, for instance, is occupied by his sick son. Fearing that his morally reprehensible job is incurring divine retribution, he finds himself forced to seek solace in the pragmatic emotionless deductions of Morteza. 

Manuscripts Don’t Burn then is as much a film for the cinema lover as for the global politics enthusiast. That its grim content is founded in reality only serves to make the story more unsettling.