| Forced Confessions | |
| Director: | Maziar Bahari |
| Producer: | Maziar Bahari for Off-Centre Productions |
| Screenplay: | Maziar Bahari |
| Music: | Nainita Desai Malcolm Laws |
| Cinematography: | John Templeton |
| Editing: | James Mullett |
| Runtime: | 58 minutes |
| Country: | England |
| Language: | English and Persian |
Forced Confessions (fa|اعترافات اجباری, Eterafate-e Ejbari) is a 2012 documentary film by the Persian Canadian journalist and filmmaker Maziar Bahari about the forced confessions in Iran obtained from a suspect through torture.[1]
The film premiered at the 25th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November 2012. The short version of the film was aired by BBC Persian TV simultaneously.
In 2009, filmmaker Maziar Bahari, a guest of honor at IDFA 2007, claimed he was forced to make a false confession that he had been collaborating with the West and committed espionage. As a filmmaker and journalist working for Western broadcasting corporations, he was the perfect scapegoat for the regime. This was a common experience for intellectuals, writers, philosophers and journalists since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The director's voice-over and interviews with fellow Iranians who have gone through the same agony lead the spectator through Iran's history of coerced confessions. They are demeaning stories about clever men who never expected to be forced to make false confessions in public but were forced to due to heavy torture.