‘A Passage of Silence’: Bardia Samia & Emery Eckman On How a Merciless Regime Comes After Its Own

You reap what you sow, but some don’t learn that until it’s too late.

There is something unsettlingly quiet about the office at the center of Bardia Samia’s A Passage of Silence. So many of us have worked in one before, so the sight of cubicles or employees clustered around desks makes us think about filing reports or filling out spreadsheets. This office, though, is different, because the powerful men who clock in and out hold the lives of strangers in their hands. With a whisper over an answered phone or with the strike of a key on a keyboard, these people destroy families with casual abandon. With distinct precision, Samia’s film confronts his audience with unspeakable desperation.

A Passage of Silence finds us in this office in the midst of the Mahsa Amini protests of 2022, but Samia’s film zooms us into this space as the deafening noise from protesters bleeds in from the outside. It’s intimate and quiet as we meet Kourosh Paraspour’s The Father, a man whose job is to use surveillance cameras around the city to track down those who are opposing and speaking out against the government. He only knows their names long enough to identify them so authorities can snatch them from the street. What this man never expects, though, is a call from his son who needs his help evade the same authorities on the hunt for dissenters. It’s remarkable that Samia can set his film against this huge moment while the story feels universally relatable.

“I wanted to create something about Iran and what was happening in 2022 during the mass protests but looking at it from the perspective of a regime worker,” Samia says. “I wanted to look at what they did every day without them thinking that it was going to affect them in any way, but then I wanted to turn the tables to show that this kind of regime does not care even about its most loyal employees. They’ve never imagined that they would be put in that position themselves, so when they are not useful, the regime doesn’t consider them and it doesn’t protect them. It’s a film where someone realizes there is no loyalty–it’s about being blind.”

As The Father tries to remove his son from the streets before the regime can find him, we see images from surveillance cameras blinking through on his computer’s monitor. Passage is simply plotted but flooded with emotion as he hears his son breathing on the other end of the line. These are not standard stock videos but videos secretly filmed on the street of Tehran and sent over to Samia and his producer, Emery Eckman.

“I wanted it to be authentic footage from Tehran without having a crew there to film everything,” he says. “We decided to do CCTV footage that happens to not be of the highest quality, and it could be low profile and low-risk to the people who are doing it. The footage came from a couple of people that I knew where, for security reasons, we didn’t credit them, which I regret,” Samia says. “It was pretty limited, honestly, so I would ask them to show, for instance, someone in front of a car or running own the street. Or I would need them hiding behind the corner on the phone, but I couldn’t ask them to spend a lot of time doing it since it wasn’t very safe to capture these images. Our VFX team also had a team in Iran who was able to get some of the more generic imagery that was used like street views.”

“I was working with Bardia on this from the very beginning, so I had a first-hand glimpse to see him problem solve,” Eckman says. “With the CCTV footage, it was a way for us to talk about Iran without trying to create something here that doesn’t feel like it. It was a great moment, because we had a way of telling the story that we both really care about to make it feel real for people who don’t fully grasp what’s going on. We wanted to give a voice to people who want to talk about these things. I loved seeing the script come together and being able to infuse it with this father-son relationship that everyone can relate to, no matter how much knowledge people might not have about what happened in Iran in 2022.

There are a lot of things recorded online of these protests and protests in general in Iran, like the ones that happened in January. For our purposes, we were trying to find very steady footage that we could use as CCTV footage, and that doesn’t really exist. It’s all mostly people who have social media, and it’s incredible the things that they were able to capture with the risk it takes to do that. Some of these videos are absolutely gut-wrenching to see, but we included the ones that we could for this film.”

When I met Samia and Eckman at this year’s Indy Shorts, they were accompanied by Paraspour, who is the most affable, approachable person you could meet. I actually didn’t recognize him at first since his presence on screen is so stern as we watch his character untangle this impossible moment. Samia reveals a way that the actor was able to connect with his character’s emotional plight.

“We had never met Kourosh before, and we simply just put out a casting call where he auditioned,” Samia says. “At that time, he had very long hair, and he told us that he would cut it. We had minimal direction for the audition, and he just blew us away. He is actually a doctor, so he was talking about how he knew what it was like to be in a space where there is a lot of sick children where their parents have no way of helping them. I believe it really helped him draw emotions for the role.”

“He’s so warm,” Eckman says. “Watching him act, he really sinks into the emotions and the story, so the more takes we did, the more we felt like he became this person. He was able to really relate to someone who is at risk of losing someone–that pain felt so real to us. Kourosh really cares about this movement and everything that’s going on, and I think it was a perfect fit since we saw eye-to-eye ideology-wise. We were all on the same page when it came to what we wanted to do with the story.”

The sound design really complements the mounting tension. We hear that storm of voices before we enter the office, but Samia uses score sparingly or he cuts noise out entirely to signal that we can breathe again. Even if we aren’t familiar with the circumstances surrounding the protest itself, the film carries enormous weight as The Father tries to keep his anxieties in check.

“For the protest chanting, I thought it was important to set that backdrop that this what’s happening outside,” Samia says. “While The Father is on the phone and talking to his wife, we can hear all the unrest. Going into the office, the background noise reminds us that this just keeps going. There’s no pausing it and there is no stopping it. This process is just happening all the way to the end. When we have that silence, like five seconds of just the office noise, nothing has stopped. That routine of identifying protesters is always ongoing. We made the decision to not hear the mother, because we wanted to stress this idea of a man’s world and women have no say in anything that’s transpiring. In Iran, they have no rights and they are never heard, so in our film, we literally don’t hear her voice. There were a lot of voiceovers that we got afterwards, and we were able to get Erfan Paydar, who is a very popular Persian rapper and artist, to do the dispatch agent. That was an amazing experience to work with him.”

“We were definitely starstruck,” Eckman says.

“Even after Kourosh came on, we had no other cast, and then he introduced us to Erfan Shahsavari, who plays both the server and the voice of the son,” Samia says. “He happens to be childhood friends with Paydar’s brother, so he should’ve gotten something like a casting director credit.”

Perhaps The Father cannot help his son, because he simply doesn’t know how to–empathy doesn’t exist of inside this office. Is that mercilessness seeping into The Father’s skin without him knowing it? Will some audiences close themselves off to this man’s plight because of his actions, or will he ever consider that his own efficiency will leads to his own destruction?

“He realizes very quickly that it is much harder when he has to deal with the same thing that all these families are dealing with every day as the innocent youth are being taken away,” Samia says. “It’s a sense of how your son has to follow in your footsteps and has your ideology and your ideas, but this young man doesn’t. He wants his freedom like everyone else, and that’s something that they’re not ready for–how do they deal with that? This father cannot fix a situation to help his own son. That being said, there are a lot of cases where the relatives or children of regime officials get captured, they do get returned to them. There are a lot of innocent people, though, who do not get answers, and they do not get the same closure–I was interested in making this father feel the same.”

With America’s most recent attacks on Iran, many audiences will wonder where to turn as they allow the haunting final image of Samia’s film wash over them. This is a moral tale of the choices we make and how we don’t imagine that they will come full circle. What happens in Samia’s film is not a direct response to what the current American administration is carrying out, but it is a condemnation of violence and government-sanctioned oppression on its people. How do we reconcile the images we see in film and what we know is happening around the world?

“We’ve had a few people come up to us after screening at Indy Shorts telling us that they had no idea that this was happening in Iran before they saw our film,” Samia says. “They expressed how they wanted to go do their own research and see what more is happening.”

“We made this film before the events in January and before the massacre where forty thousand people were killed in the protests before the war started with America and Iran,” Eckman says. “With the end of our film, people want to know what they can possibly do, and the notion that all of this is being run by all of these many different people who are being forced into this position where they have to make these horrible decisions and protect themselves. All you can hope for is that people find a way to get away from that and to stop the regime. We hope that this film inspires people to look at things for themselves. If you look at the videos that are coming out from the protests and what people are dealing with on a day-to-day basis, it’s so incredibly different than what the Iranian government is saying.”

A Passage of Silence will next play during the Psych Shorts to Thrill block at the Newport Beach Film Festival on October 18. Tickets can be found here.