Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.
Iranwire – Kian Pirfalak was just nine years old when he was shot and killed, in the back of his father’s car, by the Iranian security services. He was shot on November 16, 2022, and buried two days later. Kian’s father was injured, as well, suffering spinal cord trauma. He was nevertheless summoned by a court for questioning.
June 11 would have been Kian’s tenth birthday. But instead of celebrating his young and promising life, his family was being threatened by the Iranian authorities, and his mother’s cousin was shot and killed by security forces as he attended mourning ceremonies on the young boy’s birth date.
Hundreds of people attended Kian’s funeral on November 18 and his name has since become synonymous with the unrestrained and indiscriminate use of brutal and lethal force by the Iranian authorities to suppress nationwide protests that began in Iran in September of last year.
Witnesses and relatives of Kian’s family have previously told IranWire that the car was riddled with at least seven bullets.
A new film called “The Tulips”, by Iranian filmmaker Farzan Deljou, tells the story of Kian’s death, its aftermath for his family, amid the wider context of unrest in Iran.
Deljou’s film, which uses footage of Kian himself, clips of street protests, news bulletins from international media, and reconstructions of Kian and his family using actors, is intended as a tribute not only to Kian but to the lives of all those “martyred in the protests”.
“I love my father, my mother and everybody in the world,” Kian says in the film. “That is why … I want to grow up to be an inventor so that the world will also be proud of Iran.”
Kian wanted to become a robotics engineer when he grew up.
Deljou says his film depicts “the stark reality of the political climate in Iran, where innocent citizens, including young children like Kian, are often victims of violence and oppression. This is just one of many such incidents that occurred during the Women, Life, and Freedom movement in 2022, when Mahsa Zhina Amini was brutally murdered by the regime’s morality police.”
One long and heartbreaking sequence shows a woman, intended as Kian’s mother, looking through the child’s clothing and objects in a closet, holding them to her chest and smelling them, in an effort to remember her son.
Two of the most arresting passages in the film reconstruct the night that Kian was shot as well as showing actual footage of chants ringing out across nighttime Iranian city skylines.
“I dedicate this film to the families who have lost their beloved daughters and sons in Iran’s struggle for freedom and justice. It is my hope that this film will help raise awareness of the ongoing atrocities in Iran and inspire people to take action to promote peace and human rights around the world,” Deljou added.
