A film, an image, an actor's line can be enough to make you want to "feel the wind blowing on the shores of the Caspian Sea" and, suddenly, feel less free. "I can't go to Iran." Virginia Pishbin was 21 years old when the urgency became "explosive". And now, exactly one year after the protests that began with the death of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurd arrested for not wearing the veil correctly and who died in the hands of Tehran's moral police, tells her story before putting on her lab coat and starting the day in the clinic of the ASL of Nuoro where she works as a doctor. «My father had gone away to study. He had chosen Sassari where the Faculty of Agriculture was located, in reality he would have liked to study Sociology but the law did not allow students abroad to receive funds from the family for subjects other than technical ones". He stopped in Sardinia. «He met my mother at university. But in 1979 he returned to participate in the revolution, the one that ousted the Shah. Two years later, with the theocratic regime taking over, he had to leave Iran. Definitely. I was born here."
What do you know about your father's last time in Iran?
«He had participated in the protests of June 1981, there were 500 thousand people in the square, they shot at the demonstrators. The regime has considered the Iranian resistance an enemy of God but religion has nothing to do with it."
Meaning what?
"Islam is an open religion, just look at my home: my Islamic father, my atheist mother, my Catholic grandmother, I am Buddhist."
Was your father a political refugee?
«An exile. He ran away when the raids began."
Were you talking about this at home?
«My father died in 2016 and never pushed me towards Islam or stopped me from approaching it. In 2003, I was the one who decided to participate in a demonstration in Washington: I wanted to get to know the Iranian Resistance up close. Two years later I spent a whole month in Paris and since then I have participated in all the demonstrations, civil and political struggles."
