Tom Seymour

Among the laptops and the lattes in the foyer of London’s BFI Southbank sits a dissident and exile. Film-maker Mania Akbari fled her native Tehran last summer. She is determined to examine marriage, abortion, infidelity and lesbianism at home in Iran. She has explored what it’s like to lose your breasts to cancer. She has made films that have upset and shocked the religious establishment. Now, after 15 years of censorship, “of living in fear and frustration”, Akbari is finally seeing her films screened commercially for the first time.

The 39-year-old actor, writer and director is not in the UK by choice. During production of her latest film, From Tehran to London (originally titled Women Do Not Have Breasts), members of her crew were arrested by Iranian authorities for supposedly filming without official permission. Scared she too might be imprisoned, Akbari fled Tehran for London. “I left the country of my birth with grief, fear and frustration,” she says in her native Farsi. “But I was alienated and isolated. I could not get permission to make my films, or to get my films seen. I still love Iran. I am still fascinated by it. It gave me my creativity. But I had to leave.”

The keynote film in a season of Akbari’s work at the BFI, From Tehran to London opens with a politically charged dedication to “all the film-makers in Iran who have served a prison sentence, and the ones who are still in prison”. Yet Akbari’s films are not calls to arms. Entirely self-taught, she has made five feature-length movies – each made in near secrecy, on tiny budgets – in 10 years, while also working as a photographer and painter. Her films have screened at more than 40 festivals; her debut, 20 Fingers, won best film at Venice film festival’s Digital Cinema section. Her documentaries are even more political than her dramas: in 2011, she made what she describes as a “cautious documentary about anger and revenge, violence and law”, about a child named Benhood who was put to death by the Iranian state.

But her features are rivetingly human: pitiless, potent studies of domestic strife, and of the fight for happiness – and domination – in sexual relationships. Take off their headscarves and Akbari’s women could be social workers in Sheffield or hairdressers in south London, talking wearily about the struggle of working motherhood and love eroded by intimacy.

Akbari first came to prominence in 2002 as the lead in Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten, a film composed entirely of conversations inside a car. “Kiarostami taught me to strip away my inhibitions,” she says, “to lose myself in my work, to be totally bare, totally exposed.”

In 2007, Akbari was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. In her film 10+4, a sequel of sorts to Kiarostami’s Ten, she explores the sensation of living “with both life and death”.

“Cancer is not just an illness,” she says. “It changes your appearance as much as your inner self. We hide behind our skins. This is one of the concepts of art: to define suffering, or even death, differently. To give it a beautiful meaning.”

Her influences are not confined to cinema. She cites Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning Amour – “a dance between love and death” – but also “the reclining figures of Henry Moore, the dancers of Henri Matisse, the red armchair of Pablo Picasso”. A single scene in Akbari’s films, shorn of sympathy or pretence, without closeups, montage or stirring music, can unfold, unedited, for between 10 and 20 minutes. It can feel as if you’re witnessing a cross between fiction and documentary, yet Akbari plans and rehearses every second of her films “months in advance”. If a man stops, mid-sentence, to brush a stray hair from his wife’s face, it is no accident. “With cinema, you can take your audience by their hands and guide them through your life,” she says. “I carry with me every experience I’ve ever had.”

From a western point of view, it can be difficult to understand why the Iranian state might view Akbari’s films as such an existential challenge. But she is matter-of-fact about the issue: “Cinema can make people aware, so it is threatening to government. Governments want to impose their ideology on their people.”

With the recent election of moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani, however, Akbari is optimistic about progress: “We’re witnessing a new energy in the people or Iran. Without hope, human beings become walking corpses, which is a frightening prospect, no? A society devoid of hope reeks of decay. We must all, always, believe and welcome change.”

From Tehran with Love: The Cinema of Mania Akbari runs until 28 July at the BFI Southbank, London.