Roya

DCP / Color / 92’
Persian with Turkish and English Subtitles
Germany, Czechia, Luxembourg, Iran, 2026

Director: Mahnaz Mohammadi
Screenplay: Mahnaz Mohammadi
Cinematography: Ashkan Ashkani
Editing: Esmaeel Monsef
Cast: Melisa Sözen, Maryam Palizban, Hamidreza Djavdan, Mohammad Ali Hosseinalipour, Bacho Meburishvili, Gholamhassan Taseiri
Producer: Farzad Pak, Kaveh Farnam, Bady Minck, Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu, Ortak / Uygulayıcı Yapımcılar: Melisa Sözen, Farzad Pak
Production: PakFilm, Media Nest
World Sales: Totem Films

Synopsis

Rüya / Roya, a film by Iranian director Mahnaz Mohammadi starring Melisa Sözen, tells a story of resistance written in Istanbul. Bringing to the screen the inhumane treatment and psychological torture—aimed at forcing confessions—endured by the director and other detainees in Iran’s Evin Prison, Roya held its world premiere in the Panorama section of the 76th Berlin Film Festival. Mohammadi lived in Istanbul for a time while writing the screenplay and later settled in Germany when the oppression in Iran became unbearable. In the role of the protagonist Roya, Melisa Sözen portrays a character who has stopped speaking due to the torture she endured; she is disoriented and struggling to distinguish reality from dreams. The audience joins her in the process of gradually regaining a sense of reality that had been shattered by the lies, forced injections, and solitary confinement she experienced in prison. As the pieces of the film slowly fall into place like a puzzle, Mohammadi does justice to both the art of cinema and political activism.

Screenings