Songs from Inside: Women inside notorious Iran prison fight for their rights

Songs from Inside tells the extraordinary true story of three women imprisoned in Iran’s infamous Evin Prison after participating in protests against the mandatory hijab. Since the emergence of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, thousands of women in Iran have been detained for standing up for women’s rights. Evin Prison, located in Tehran, is one of the detention centres where these women are held. Despite enduring torture and threats of execution, they persist in their fight for justice, drawing strength and solidarity amid oppression.

This powerful and distinctive documentary unfolds through hand-drawn animation and is narrated by Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a former Evin inmate herself. Compiled from multiple credible sources, it reveals the reality of life behind these prison walls—stories that rarely reach the outside world. At its heart, it is the story of three women: Nasim, Rezvaneh, and Vida.

Vida, a journalist, withstands imprisonment through her art. The cold prison walls and plain bedsheets become her canvas. She paints portraits of her fellow inmates awaiting execution, ensuring their faces are seen by the outside world. Nasim has spent 500 days in limbo, caught between life and death as she awaits her sentence. Meanwhile, Resvaneh, newly pregnant, worries deeply about the future of her unborn daughter. Despite the surrounding darkness, the women of Evin Prison draw strength from one another, holding on to and fighting for fleeting moments of hope.