Husband of Iran’s ski coach bars her from leaving country for championships

Associated Press: The Iranian women’s alpine ski team flew on Wednesday to Italy for the world championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo without their coach, whose husband has barred her from leaving the country, Iranian media reported.

The reports by the semi-official ISNA news agency and the pro-reform Shargh daily did not provide any details as to why Samira Zargari’s husband had not allowed her to leave. Iran’s ski federation also did not offer any information.
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Under Iranian law, husbands can stop their wives from traveling outside of the country.

Zargari is not the first married athlete whose husband prevented her from leaving Iran. In 2015, soccer player Niloufar Ardalan missed the Asian Cup tournament in futsal — an indoor version of soccer — after her husband confiscated her passport in a domestic dispute.

Women’s sports largely disappeared from Iran after the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Over time, however, women’s sports gained in popularity, especially soccer. Social customs still come into the game though, as the country’s soccer team plays its games with players’ hair covered by traditional headscarves, or hijabs.

Two Islamic countries make the headscarf mandatory for women in public — Iran and Saudi Arabia. FIFA overturned a yearlong ban against players wearing hijabs in 2012.

Four Iranian skiers are entered for the women’s giant slalom race on Thursday at the world championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo: Atefeh Ahmadi, Sadaf Savehshemshaki, Forough Abbasi and Marjan Kalhor.

They are part of a 99-skier field for a race in which the favorites are Marta Bassino and Federica Brignone of host Italy, Petra Vlhova of Slovakia and Mikaela Shiffrin of the United States.

'The Naked King': Retracing revolutions in Iran and Poland

Deutsche Welle: "Revolt is an adventure of the heart," legendary Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski once said during a television interview. The conversation took place in his study at home, amidst books and piles of materials. The clip is just one of many that film director Andreas Hoessli has included in his political documentary The Naked King: 18 Fragments on Revolution.

The director chose to assemble a variety of images from interviews, both historical and contemporary, and archival footage. The result is a panorama of the uprisings in Poland and Iran some 40 years ago.

"The film explores the transformation of man in the revolution, confronts secret service agents and shows the attempt to capture a new attitude towards life in memory," its website states. The film celebrated its online cinema premiere in Germany on Wednesday.

The movie tells the story of Kapuscinski, who traveled to Tehran in 1978 to cover the Iranian revolution as a reporter. Those events and their aftermath would keep him extremely busy — that is, until the uprising of shipyard workers in 1980 in his home country of Poland.

Director Hoessli regularly interweaves the revolutionary events in both countries. Interspersed are excerpts from Kapuscinski's literary reportages, which bridge the sections.

Under surveillance in Poland

Hoessli knew Kapuscinski personally. From 1978 to 1980, the Swiss director lived in Warsaw as a research fellow and traveled around the country a great deal.

"[Kapuscinski] was a kind of mentor to me, in all matters," the filmmaker told DW. The mass strikes in Poland, the revolutionary upheaval, the euphoria, the struggle of the trade union movement Solidarity (Solidarnosc) for democracy — Hoessli experienced it all it firsthand.

As a foreigner, he quickly became a target of the secret services. He did not discover that he was being watched at the time until he located and investigated his file under the code name "Figurate Hassan" in Polish archives. In The Naked King, he interweaves his own biographical search for clues with quotes from Kapuscinski's literary reportages.

The years of the Iranian Revolution

Hoessli traveled to Iran a total of four times for his film. He places unusual interlocutors in front of the camera: journalist Paris Rafie, who describes the sense of fear and oppression; writer Amir Hassan Cheheltan, who had to flee to Italy to escape assassination attempts by the secret service; and the young filmmaker Negar Tahsili, who traces the Iranian Revolution of 1978 in photo archives.

Hoessli also interviewed Mohsen Rafiqdoost, the driver who was supposed to bring revolution leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from the Tehran airport into the city after his return from exile on February 1, 1979. But in the crush of enthusiastic crowds, the vehicle remained trapped in the street, and Khomeini had to be flown out by helicopter.

In the film, Rafiqdoost recounts those hours vividly. It is an authentic eyewitness account of the Iranian Revolution that drove the previous ruler, the shah of Iran, out of the country in January 1979.

Capturing images of Iran

Hoessli was arrested three different times while in Iran. To this day, he does not know which of the many Iranian secret services were involved. The images he managed to capture on camera in this Islamic republic are impressive and unusual: artistic film stills, quiet snapshots of faces, of nighttime street scenes, of bustling urban boulevards.

"I approach people, searching their faces: What's going on in their minds? That is an important theme of mine. How is the history of the revolutions expressed in their eyes, in their thoughts, in what is said? What remains of it?" Hoessli said >>>