Arrested for Singing While Female, in “My Orange Garden”

One thing is immediately clear in Anna-Sophia Richard’s short film “My Orange Garden,” and that is how much Faravaz Farvardin loves to sing. She issues rich, quavering vocals—no matter whether on a stage in a large formal theatre, over the shoulder of a loved one she’s embracing, or standing in front of the ice case at a fish market. “I sang illegally many times in public,” she says. Faravaz is from Iran, where women have been forbidden from singing in public since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. One day, she was arrested, and sentenced to a year in prison. When she was invited to Berlin for a concert, she stayed, afraid of being jailed if she returned home. Between songs, we see her explore her own identity and femininity—examining her body and her feelings about her body, being in quiet contemplation with other women, describing her worries for her homeland and how she sees the relationship between gender and control. She speaks with the same clarity and emotion that suffuses her singing: “Suppressing women is the key to control an entire society.”