It would be easier, and much safer, to remain silent, but some leading lights of the Iranian film industry are taking a stand.
She’s a household name in Iran, an actor so widely celebrated she was once mobbed in a Brisbane fashion store when fans recognised her. You might say she is mad to be interviewed over this scratchy VPN link from Tehran, given the very real chance it will land her back in the maw of state security.
And you’d be right, because she is mad. Angry. Incandescent at what has transpired since the death in custody five months ago of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman picked up by the so-called morality police for failing to secure her headscarf.
The actor joined the demonstrations that thronged the streets of the capital, where people chanted “woman, life, freedom” in noisy defiance of the regime. She spoke out in her own right, too, taking to what was left of social media in Iran to denounce the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for appropriating her celebrity to defend its deeply tarnished reputation.