Footage that went viral from Iran in late 2022 showed a woman being shot by security forces while capturing a bloody crackdown on anti-government protests on her phone. The victim’s last words were: “Film it!”

Mehraneh Salimian graduated from art school the same day, and that final wish guided her and her partner, Amin Pakparvar, to make their documentary short premiering at the Berlin film festival on Tuesday. Memories of a Window is dedicated to the slain woman, Shirin Alizadeh, and the role of amateur videos in recording and emboldening dissent in Iran.

Now film students in Chicago, Salimian and Pakparvar worked from a large trove of anonymous smartphone videos – they estimate they viewed about 2,000 clips – as well as their own footage gathered in Tehran during the 2022-23 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising.

“We’re hoping that we can isolate this period of time in Iranian history. Although there has since been even more brutality happening, more violence, that period was important too,” says Salimian, 26.

In their film, they highlight the unique perspective of people filming from the purported safety behind car or home windows to hold authorities to account and challenge official narratives of violent incidents – a technique also used recently during anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis.

“It was a great tension between the lies or false information the state media was presenting of the movement and what we were experiencing,” says Salimian.“Protesters started filming the events and they anonymously uploaded them online. It was like a movement happening from behind windows.”

Salimian describes that space as “like a threshold, a site that was not in the street, but did not have the safety of the home”.

“Shirin was one of the people who was shooting the events from behind her window when she was shot and killed,” on 22 September 2022, she says. “I was very, very moved. It shook me to the core.”

Alizadeh was in a car driven by her husband, with two other travel companions, when they saw protesters being shot dead in the street in the north-eastern town of Salman Shahr as they sought to drive back to their home city of Isfahan. Her smartphone footage of the throng of demonstrators as security forces opened fire features prominently in the film, along with her command to one of the fellow passengers, “Film it!” as a woman appeared to lie on the roadside shot dead.

Seconds later, at least one bullet pierced the rear window of the car and hit 36-year-old Alizadeh in the neck and head, according to Amnesty International. She died in hospital.

Those distressing images are intercut with rousing scenes shot by Salimian and Pakparvar, 28, from their flat during the same period, in which neighbours join a chorus of anti-regime protest songs from their own apartments.

“For decades Iranians have been protesting and every time their voices have been suppressed and censored. But a couple of years after that, they protested again in higher numbers,” says Pakparvar. “It’s their courage that is contagious and although they have been suppressed, they see the value of uprising again and again.”

The protests evolved from a focus on restrictions of women’s rights, including the compulsory hijab, toward the more broad-based movement that erupted in recent months. With it came an internet blackout by the authorities to prevent the sharing of such videos, says Pakparvar, as well as horrific violence against demonstrators in which thousands died.

“This is a strategy of state and it’s kind of working but not fully. There were Starlink satellites that people managed to use” to distribute images, he says. “Every day we see more and more videos of the massacre. It’s heartbreaking.”

The film-makers say they will be unable to attend the premiere in Berlin because they are in the US on student visas, and would be barred from returning under the travel ban reimposed by President Trump in 2025. But they will join the presentation by video link.

The feedback in Chicago has already confirmed the film’s resonance, they say, with fellow students comparing it to China under the Covid lockdown and US activism during the Black Lives Matter movement. “It shows that we are living in a very vulnerable moment internationally and people are looking for freedom in various contexts,” says Pakparvar.

Both are optimistic they will one day return to a free and democratic Iran. “We are pretty hopeful to be honest. They can’t control it any more,” Pakparvar says of the regime.

“Maybe if you had asked us 10 years ago, we would have had no general sense of what kind of freedom we want. But now it’s crystal clear. We know our rights, we know the goal, and we know the values that we want in our life and in our home country. You see millions of people are aware of that and we’re moving toward it.”

The Berlin festival has long championed Iran’s dissident film-makers. On opening night on Thursday, Iranian creatives walked the red carpet holding “Free Iran” signs. The next day, Iranian independent film-makers staged a performance with volunteers lying on the ground to symbolise those killed during the January protests.