Pegah Ahangarani grew up around Iran's cameras, first as a filmmaker's daughter, then as an acclaimed actress. Now living in exile in London with her newborn daughter, she turns the lens on the people who shaped her: five relatives and mentors, each embodying a different way of resisting.

Built from home movies, her father's films, newspaper clippings, recorded voices and phone footage from the 2009 street protests, Rehearsals for a Revolution traces more than four decades of Iranian history, from the 1979 revolution to the war that began this year. Its five chapters move between hope and disillusionment, between the private archive and the public record, as Ahangarani, now a mother herself, weighs her elders' choices against her own.

Winner of the L'Œil d'or, Cannes' top documentary prize, it is a family archive that becomes a nation's testimony, and a meditation on what it means, and costs, to keep hoping.