Mehran Tamadon explores what it was like being interrogated by the Iranian regime by asking prisoners to reconstruct their experiences.
Alongside his companion film Where God Is Not, My Worst Enemy finds Tamadon shifting focus from the interrogated to the interrogator. The filmmaker sought an individual who had been interrogated by Iranian authorities in order to draw on their experiences to play an interrogator. The role finally fell to the Cannes-winning lead actor of Holy Spider, Zar Amir Ebrahimi. Together in an anonymous room, with Tamadon stripped to his underwear, they reconstruct the interrogation process, which gradually becomes an examination of the nature of power and coercion. The resulting film is intense and, at times, uncomfortable. And as it progresses, My Worst Enemy becomes an exploration of cinema’s relationship with its audience, questioning whether there is a limit to what it can show.