French actors Marion Cotillard and Juliette Binoche expressed support for women in Iran by chopping off their hair.
Last month women across Iran began protesting against the country’s oppressive standards for women following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody on September 16. Amini was detained by Iran’s morality police for wearing a hijab improperly. She was in a coma for three days and died of what the police reported as a “heart attack.” But eyewitnesses claim they saw police beating Amini, and an anonymous medical official says her cause of death was head injury.
In Iran, women’s hair must be covered; cutting it openly, therefore, is seen as an act of protest. “We want to show them that we don’t care about their standards, their definition of beauty or what they think that we should look like,” 36-year-old Faezeh Afshan, an Iranian chemical engineer living in Italy, told CNN. “It is to show that we are angry. In our literature, cutting the hair is a symbol of mourning, and sometimes a symbol of protesting. If we can cut our hair to show that we are angry…we will do it.”
On Wednesday, October 5, Cotillard shared a video to Instagram showing Binoche chopping off her hair from the top of her head after she says, “For freedom.” Then the video cuts to Cotillard chopping a few inches off her hair.
“For the courageous women and men of Iran who are changing the world at this very moment, fighting for freedom. We stand by you,” Cotillard wrote in her caption.
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Marion Cotillard and Juliette Binoche coordinated their posts. Binoche also shared the video from her IG account, using the caption “✨In SOLIDARITY for FREEDOM RIGHTS for IRANIAN WOMEN and MEN ✨.” See it here:
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The protests, which have grown more bold in the past few weeks, “transcend Iran’s many social and ethnic divisions, breaking a decades-old barrier of fear and posing an unprecedented threat to the regime,” CNN reports.
