'Tatami'’s Israeli director and Iranian screenwriter discuss historic collaboration

When I meet Elham Erfani, who co-wrote Guy Nattiv’s Tatami, the movie about the struggle of a female Iranian judoka and her coach, at the Jerusalem Film Festival, where the film had just premiered (now open in theaters throughout Israel) it’s hard not to notice her wavy, jet-black hair. 

As Erfani, also an actress who has a small role in Tatami and a is designer, speaks animatedly about her work, she touches her hair often, not to smooth it into place, but as if she is checking that it’s still there, uncovered. 

She doesn’t take the simple freedom to walk the world with her hair uncovered for granted, even 18 years after leaving Iran because she remembers all too well what it was like to be forced to cover her body and hair, and to try to hide the glow of her independent spirit. 

“At just six years old, I was forced to wear a uniform with a scarf that covered my hair, and I hated it. This was the first constraint I faced as a young girl,” she said. She found creative ways to get around the strictures placed on women, she said, even taking extreme measures, like cutting her hair short and playing sports with boys. 

But while she was naturally drawn to break these onerous rules, there were always risks, and at the age of 19, her older sister was imprisoned by the regime and then released, eventually moving to Europe. 

Understanding that her own free spirit would lead her into trouble in Iran, Erfani, who had begun expressing herself creatively through designing clothes and sketching models, followed her sister to Paris in 2006, and later branched out into movies. 

She has visited her homeland in the intervening years but cannot imagine living there again under the current regime.  

The challenges faced by women in Iran, who are still forced to wear hijabs and adhere to many aspects of Sharia Law, are the focus of Tatami. 

The movie tells the story of an independent-minded judoka, Leila (Arienne Mandi), competing in the World Championships in Georgia. Her coach, Maryam (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who co-directed the film with Nattiv), is ordered by Iranian officials to force Leila to drop out of the competition so she won’t have to face an Israeli in the final. 

It was inspired by several true stories, including that of Saeid Mollaei, an Iranian judoka, who defected following the regime’s pressure and became friends with his Israeli opponent, Sagi Muki. 

The Iranian regime’s hate toward Israel is so strong that they do not want their athletes to compete against Israelis under any circumstances. 

Nattiv is an Israeli-born director who has been making movies internationally for years. 

Israeli director with award-winning films 

His Israeli movies include the Ophir Award-winning The Flood and Magic Men. In 2019, he and his wife, producer/actress Jaime Ray Newman (who also produced and has a supporting role in Tatami), won an Oscar for the short film, Skin, about racism in America, which Nattiv later turned into a feature starring Jamie Bell. 

Jerusalem Film Festival goers may remember Nattiv’s previous film, Golda, with Helen Mirren playing Golda Meir, which opened the 2023 festival. 

Tatami was produced by Keshet Studios, Keshet International's production company based in Los Angeles, and New Native Pictures in collaboration with White Lodge Productions and WestEnd Films.

Nattiv toyed with the idea of dramatizing the Mollaei-Muki saga (in which Israeli judoka Muki loses to his friend, Iranian defector Mollaei representing Azerbaijan), but then the Woman, Life, Freedom protests began, following the murder of 22-year old Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini in 2022 after she was arrested for wearing her hijab incorrectly. 

“Very fast it became a female-oriented script,” Nattiv said, following the actions of several Iranian female athletes who rebelled against the regime by taking off their hijabs in public. 

Bringing in Iranians to work on the film 

But he was aware that he needed to work with Iranians on the film. “I knew that as an Israeli, as an Ashkenazi Jew, I cannot tell a story about Iranian women. It would be a mistake. It’s not for me to tell alone. And that’s why I opened myself to Iranian female creative power. That’s why I brought Elham and Zar to work with me.”

As he collaborated with Erfani on the script, “I learned that many Iranians are living an underground life, in underground clubs. Smoking, drinking, and no hijabs. In private houses. That’s something I didn’t know. I learned about Iranian hip-hop power, a lot of them are doing hip-hop as a demonstration of art. I learned that houses in Iran look like Tel Aviv, there are new modern houses and shopping malls. I learned that a woman has to have the signature of her husband to leave the country. It’s a dichotomy. It’s between an extreme underground world that defies Sharia law and then the opposite life aboveground which is very strict.”

His Iranian collaborators helped him “to show women’s normal lives in their homes with their husbands and children, they don’t have the hijab on at home... I learned what is life in Tehran... In one word, authenticity is what they brought.” 

The screenwriter and director met after Erfani saw Skin. She loved it and wrote to him on social media just as he was beginning the search for a collaborator on Tatami. “I’m so proud that I’m the first Iranian who came to the project,” she said. 

They had an instant rapport. “The first second I was talking to Guy and Jaime in a video call, I felt everything flowed, it was very comfortable, I felt like I was with my cousins, my brother, my sister, like I’m with my family.”

She is realistic about the fact that working with an Israeli director means she can no longer visit her homeland. 

Speaking about a scene from Tatami, Erfani said, “Leila says, ‘You know, we can never go back to Iran, we can never return if we make this decision.’ And that was my life. I don’t want to cry,” she said but teared up anyway. “I said OK, this is my passion, I want to continue making this movie, but I know I can never go back to Iran. When you work with Israelis, or Americans, or Europeans, and are seen without the hijab, you know that you can never go back, as a woman.”

They were working on the movie at the height of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran. “That was a hard time because we would always see on the news that a lot of people were executed and I said to myself, ‘I have this one life. And I can be the voice of many people. It’s not just a slogan, I can be the messenger for many women.

“I think this movement is very brave. We grew up very scared, with a lot of fear, when I was a kid in Iran. Now, this generation is very brave, I’m very proud of them, and they protest all the time... Many women were raped and tortured in prison, many were killed, men and women, very young, they were killed. There were a lot of protests in France and Berlin and the USA. I was very impressed by all these people protesting in Iran.”Erfani feels an urgency in telling this story now.

“This act by Leila rekindles a flame in Maryam and gives her wings to fight, offering Maryam a second chance to live differently and end her suffering. 

Thus, even if Leila and her coach may not have won the gold medal, they have won the most important battle of their lives,” she said, making it clear how much she identifies with the characters. 

She said she wasn’t afraid to visit Israel during the current war. 

“After the revolution of 1979, we experienced eight years of war between Iran and Iraq, which is why we have the spirit of fighters, like the Tatami characters. I always told myself not to give up and to remember the path I took to get here, despite moments of doubt, which is very human.”

Nattiv, who is currently working on a film starring Naomi Watts that is based on the strange story of how his grandmother joined a cult, recalled how Tatami had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival last September, where it won an award and received a 10-minute standing ovation.

“We went there very much in the ‘peace, love, and rock and roll’ mood. There was an Iranian protest, a Woman, Life, Freedom protest, outside our screening, and it was so beautiful to see. October 7 shattered everything, but made the film much more relevant.”