Iranian actress, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, wins best actress at Cannes

Zar Amir Ebrahimi, an Iranian actress who lives in exile after a smear campaign about her love life, sobbed with joy after winning the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Ebrahimi, 41, won for her role as a journalist trying to unravel the serial deaths of prostitutes in Iran’s holy city of Mashhad in the film Holy Spider.

“I have come a long way to be on this stage tonight. It was not an easy story. It was humiliation but there was cinema,” she told.

Holy Spider, directed by Danish-Iranian Ali Abbasi, is based on the true story of a working-class guy known as the “Spider Killer” who murdered prostitutes in the early 2000s.

The film was not allowed to be shot in Iran, therefore it was instead shot in Jordan.

In her early twenties, Ebrahimi rose to fame in Iran for her supporting part in Nargess, one of the country’s longest-running soap operas.

In Holy Spider, Ebrahimi’s character has likewise been the target of lewd rumors and male predation.

The film implies that there was minimal official push to apprehend the murderer, who becomes a religious right hero.

Holy Spider received a number of positive reviews at Cannes, with The Hollywood Reporter describing it as “equal parts fascinating and frightening, and not necessarily for the faint of heart.”

Abbasi stressed that the picture should not be viewed as divisive.

“Everything shown here is part of people’s everyday life. There is enough evidence that people in Iran have sex, too. There’s ample evidence of prostitution in every city of Iran,” he told.

Ebrahimi grew raised in Tehran, where she attended theatre school and made her debut film at the age of 18.

She immediately gained a reputation for portraying wise and morally upright characters.

“This film is about women, it’s about their bodies, it’s a movie full of faces, hair, hands, feet, breasts, sex, everything that is impossible to show in Iran,” Ebrahimi told the audience.