Nearly 100 prominent Iranians, including artists and filmmakers, have been summoned by security agencies or judicial authorities after speaking out against a new wave of executions, particularly the public hanging of protesters in Isfahan, a rights activist said.
More than 20 of those summoned were well-known film and television actors, civil rights activist Mehdi Mahmoudian reported Saturday on his Telegram channel Khabaraneha.
The report said those targeted had been among public figures posting against the executions under the hashtag “No to executions.”
“The scope of the summonses is far broader than has been officially reported, with around 100 people summoned by security agencies or judicial authorities in connection with the case,” the report added.
Iran executed Amirhossein Safari and Abolfazl Sepahi in Isfahan’s Alikhani Square on July 28 amid a heavy security presence and reports of clashes near the site.
The two were among 12 young men sentenced to death in the Alikhani Square case. Golmohammad Mohammadi and Erfan Esfandiari had been executed earlier in July.
Iranian authorities accused the defendants of involvement in the deaths of four security personnel, as well as arson and vandalism during January protests.
UN experts raised concerns over closed-door proceedings, alleged mistreatment and the use of televised confessions.
The late-July executions brought the number of people put to death in the Alikhani Square case to four, leaving eight others under sentence of death.
A new generation of Persian-language reality television has taken shape beyond the Islamic Republic’s borders, largely in Turkey and on YouTube, where programs built around dating, fashion, relationships and competition can show forms of social life that would be prohibited or heavily censored inside Iran.
The most prominent example is Eternal Love, a Persian-language dating show filmed in Turkey whose format resembles Love Island: young single men and women live together, form relationships and compete for love and prize money.
What looks familiar to international reality-TV audiences carries a different weight in the Iranian context. Contestants flirt, dance and drink, men and women date and touch openly, and women appear without the compulsory dress rules imposed inside Iran — all beyond what broadcasters operating under the Islamic Republic could show.
The popularity of such programs therefore reflects an unusual feature of contemporary Iranian culture: shows that could not legally be made for television at home are produced a short distance away and streamed back to viewers inside the country. Yet behind the relationships, arguments, clothes, tattoos and social-media controversies lies a broader story about migration, changing relations between women and men, economic insecurity, internet celebrity and a generation living somewhere between departure and arrival.
The contestants do not represent all young Iranians. Participation itself requires a degree of selection: the ability to leave Iran, willingness to expose private life, comfort before a camera and the capacity to turn oneself into a media personality. Their significance lies less in statistical representation than in how clearly they display some of the contradictions confronting a section of Iran’s younger generation.
Turkey as destination or waiting room?
For many Iranians, Turkey is not necessarily the final destination of migration but one of its first stops. Geographic proximity, comparatively easy travel and established Iranian communities have turned it into a space between origin and destination, close enough to remain tied culturally and socially to Iran while lying outside the Islamic Republic’s direct restrictions.
At the end of 2025, more than 3.6 million foreign nationals were living in Turkey, according to the International Organization for Migration, including 1,151,969 people with various forms of residence permits. Iranians were also among the main nationalities represented among applicants for and holders of international protection.
The more revealing issue, however, is not simply how many migrants are there but how temporary stays become prolonged lives. Someone who expected to spend months in Turkey may remain for years without knowing whether they will settle there, move to Europe or North America, or eventually return to Iran.
Under those conditions, temporary status becomes more than an immigration category. It shapes decisions about employment, money, relationships and family because long-term planning becomes harder when the country in which someone will live several years from now remains uncertain.
This is one of the central contradictions visible in the reality shows produced abroad. Leaving Iran can bring considerably greater freedom over clothing, dating, appearance and behavior in public, and the contrast is particularly stark in programs such as Eternal Love, where conduct that is ordinary in international reality television would be virtually impossible to broadcast from inside Iran.
Yet personal freedom does not necessarily bring stability. A migrant may have far greater authority over whom to date or what to wear while holding a temporary residence permit, working irregularly and remaining uncertain about the next country they will be able to call home. Migration therefore becomes more complicated than a simple movement from repression to freedom: someone may gain control over their body and private life while losing certainty over their economic and geographical future.
When attention becomes income
In those circumstances, appearing on a widely watched reality show can have value far beyond entertainment. Visibility itself can become an economic asset, particularly for migrants who may lack secure employment, savings or straightforward access to the labor market.
A contestant who enters a program with a modest following can emerge with thousands of new followers and convert that attention into advertising for clothing stores, beauty services, restaurants and other businesses aimed at Persian-speaking customers. Views and followers acquire monetary value, meaning the competition often continues after filming ends as former contestants try to preserve public attention and convert it into income.
This helps explain the continuing cycle of breakups, disputes, new relationships, accusations and public responses surrounding reality-show participants on social media. It does not mean that every conflict is manufactured, but platforms reward novelty and confrontation, allowing private life itself to become content. Romance, jealousy, friendship and heartbreak can produce views, turning experiences that once belonged largely to private life into part of a person’s professional capital.
The tattoos, piercings, clothing and carefully constructed appearances of many contestants can also be read within this broader context. For someone whose residency, employment and future country may lie partly outside their control, the body remains one of the areas over which they can exercise immediate authority.
For audiences inside Iran, that carries another meaning. The Islamic Republic has spent decades regulating appearance, particularly that of women, through compulsory dress rules and state intervention. A woman appearing freely before a camera without compulsory hijab therefore represents more than a different fashion choice; she also embodies the distance between two systems of living.
At the same time, leaving Iran does not necessarily erase attitudes formed there. Men and women may interact far more freely than Iranian state television permits, yet jealousy, controlling behavior, gender stereotypes and unequal expectations can survive in the new environment. Crossing a political border does not mean every social and cultural boundary has been left behind.
Those seeking fame and those trying to keep it
The sense of suspension extends beyond younger contestants. Some Persian-language programs made abroad are hosted by performers who achieved considerable fame inside Iran before leaving the country, creating a revealing contrast between participants hoping to become public figures and established celebrities trying to preserve or rebuild their careers before an audience they once reached through Iranian cinema or television.
Migration places the two groups in different circumstances but also gives them something in common: uncertainty over what comes next. For a well-known actor living abroad, hosting a YouTube program may offer a lucrative contract, continued access to a large Persian-speaking audience and the beginnings of a new professional life, but it may equally represent a temporary stage or a substitute for a career no longer available in Iran.
The uncertainty becomes clearer when the possibility of return is considered. Migration is not necessarily a one-way journey. Someone may live in Turkey today, try to move to Europe tomorrow and years later return to Iran for family, financial, professional or personal reasons.
There have been cases of Iranians who worked abroad before returning and later distancing themselves in Islamic Republic media from aspects of their previous activities or positions. Such examples cannot be generalized to the diaspora, but they illustrate how fragile the apparent finality of migration can be: someone convinced today that they have left permanently cannot know with certainty where they will live several years from now or what relationship they may then have with the country they left.
Watching possible futures
This may also help explain why reality shows made outside Iran attract such interest among audiences still living inside the country. Viewers are not simply watching young people date, argue or dress differently; they are seeing several possible futures compressed into the same screen — greater personal freedom, migration, unstable work, internet income, fame, failure, onward movement and even return.
That is what makes the shows more revealing than their often superficial plots suggest. They offer a view of a generation that can no longer be divided neatly into those who stayed in Iran and those who left. Some remain closely tied to Iran through language, family, culture and audience while living daily lives that no longer fully belong to the society inside its borders, without yet having put down durable roots elsewhere.
Even the media ecosystem surrounding them reflects that condition. The programs are Iranian in language, audience and cultural reference points but geographically foreign, watched inside Iran while being produced outside the Islamic Republic’s legal and social restrictions. Their participants address an Iranian public while trying to construct careers and identities in another country.
The deeper limbo, then, may not simply be between Iran and Turkey or Iran and Europe, but between a lost certainty and a future that has yet to take shape. Home is no longer only the place that was left behind, while the destination is not necessarily somewhere that has already been reached. The past remains present in language, relationships, fears and habits, while the future may still be too unstable to support a durable new identity.
In that setting, visibility can become more than the pursuit of celebrity. It can offer a way to build status, income and a sense of place when other fixed markers of life — country, profession, community and social position — have become uncertain.
Reality television did not create this condition and cannot explain an entire generation, but by moving Iranian lives into villas and studios outside the country and streaming them back across the border, it has made one part of that experience unusually visible: people who have escaped some of the restrictions of one society without yet acquiring the security of another.
For them, the defining question may no longer be simply whether to leave Iran, remain abroad or return, but where, amid greater freedom and persistent instability, it is possible finally to belong.
In the video, Afsaneh Chatrenoor, a national team forward and four-time top scorer of Iran's women's league, faces Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, the cleric who runs the judiciary. She recites her sporting record and asks him to intervene so that she can be formally employed, so that there is something for her when the football ends.
In a normal country, an athlete's livelihood is not the judiciary's business, and no one petitions a security official for a paycheck. The scene works differently in Iran, where basic rights are routed out of ordinary channels and reissued as favors, dependent on the recommendation, the intercession, the mercy of an official.
A woman footballer is first stripped of what makes an athletic career a career: professional contracts, job security, broadcast rights, media coverage, a visible future. Then, for a fraction of what was taken, she must sit before power and ask.
No one expects a footballer to become a dissident against a state that has answered protest with mass executions. But there is a long distance between fighting the system and petitioning it for mercy, and the space between those two points is where the rest of her team now lives.
The one who spoke
Zahra Alizadeh chose a different point on that line. When security forces massacred protesters in January, the forward announced she was leaving the national team in protest. Within hours, her post vanished from Instagram, amid reports of security threats against players and their families and pressure to delete anything that read as dissent.
Alizadeh was no fringe squad member. In the qualifiers that sent Iran to the Women's Asian Cup in Australia, she scored against Bhutan and set up a goal against Singapore. She was never called up again, and within months she walked away from football altogether.
The message to every woman still in the squad was unambiguous: the right to play lasts exactly as long as the silence about the killing does.
The ones who left, and the ones brought back
Weeks later in Australia, the quiet broke. Seven members of the traveling party moved to seek humanitarian protection, a walkout confirmed at the time by Iran International, with US President Donald Trump publicly urging Canberra to take them in.
Five reversed course and flew home. The reversal is not simple to read: it happened in an atmosphere of dread, fear for families in Iran, the watchful presence of federation security officers, and reports of pressure both direct and oblique, with threats attributed to the Revolutionary Guards.
Neither staying nor returning, as the circumstances stood, can honestly be called a free choice.
What the government did next completed the picture. The returned players were paraded at Tehran's Valiasr Square, presented as proof of love of homeland and the collapse of what officials called the asylum plot. The crisis became a pageant.
The star nobody recognized
One moment from that pageant deserves to outlive it.
Golnoush Khosravi, herself a national team player and one of the figures in the Australia episode, was handed a microphone and sent into the crowd at a state rally to ask people what they thought of the women's team and the affair she had been part of. The answers were warm.
People thanked the returned players, said they loved them, said they were proud of them.
Not one of them recognized the national team player holding the microphone.
That is the Islamic Republic's relationship with women's football, compressed into a single scene: a state that buses in crowds to celebrate players it has spent decades making invisible.
Women's matches are almost never broadcast; photography is restricted; the players compete in mandated full cover.
The country's champions can walk any street unrecognized, and when the government finally needed their faces for its own story, it discovered the erasure had worked too well.
In its pageant, the player is not an athlete with an identity, a record and professional rights; she is a prop for a narrative, thanked on camera by people who do not know that the woman interviewing them is on the team.
The invisibility of the women who play has an older twin in the women who watch. Stadiums have been closed to female fans since shortly after the 1979 revolution, a ban that took the life of Sahar Khodayari, the fan who set herself on fire in 2019 facing prison for sneaking into a match, and that has since eased only in small, revocable concessions extracted under FIFA pressure.
The ledger abroad
Meanwhile, the world keeps collecting what Iran discards. Taekwondo fighter Kimia Alizadeh, once the country's only female Olympic medalist, left declaring herself one of millions of oppressed Iranian women and won Olympic bronze for Bulgaria. Chess players Sara Khadem, Mitra Hejazipour and Dorsa Derakhshani now play for Spain, France and the United States. This month, weightlifter Yekta Jamali, who left as a teenage medal prospect, was named best lifter of the German Bundesliga final, according to Persian-language media reports.
And on Wednesday, in Brisbane, Fatemeh Pasandideh, 22, and Atefeh Ramezanisadeh, 34, the two who did not board the plane home, received Australian citizenship at a ceremony attended by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke.
Both now train with Brisbane Roar's women's side, and their passports make them eligible, one day, to play for the country that took them in.
"This citizenship is more than a certificate; it is a symbol of hope, safety and the opportunity to build a new future," Ramezanisadeh wrote. Pasandideh remembered "those who lost their lives or remain in prison."
Four roles, no future
One was erased for a sentence of protest. Some left home without the chance to say goodbye. Some came back and were placed inside a propaganda frame. And one, the best striker in the country, sat before the head of the judiciary and asked for a job.
These are not the same choices, and the women who made them do not bear the same responsibility. But they are all products of one structure, a system that recognizes only a few roles for a woman who plays football: silent, exiled, an instrument on a stage, or a supplicant before power.
What appears in none of these frames is the thing itself: an independent athlete whose success could buy her dignity, security and a future in her own country.
Chatrenoor says she does not regret coming home. Pasandideh is 22, with a passport, a club and a career ahead of her. Same team, same tournament, one flight's difference.
HRANA said 54 detainees were being held in Ardabil prison, near Iran's border with Azerbaijan. Of those, 25 have been sentenced to between six months and five years and three months in prison, while 29 remain in custody without having had a hearing in their cases.
Among those convicted, Ahmad Seifi received the longest sentence of five years and three months, while Milad Ashkani was sentenced to four years. Three others received sentences of three years and six months, according to HRANA.
Prosecutors seek harsher sentences
An informed source told HRANA that Ardabil prosecutor Jalal Afaghi considered the sentences handed to 10 of those convicted too lenient and had asked Iran's Supreme Court to increase their punishments.
HRANA said full details of the charges, proceedings and courts responsible for the sentences had not been made public.
Some of the detainees have also been denied telephone calls and family visits, while relatives have faced restrictions in seeking information about their cases or requesting temporary release, the rights group said.
Hundreds detained in northwestern province
Around 800 people were arrested in Ardabil province during the January protests, according to HRANA. The group said about 500 were released during the first 10 days and roughly another 250 were later freed after posting bail or other forms of security.
The cases form part of a much broader judicial crackdown following the protests. Rights groups have estimated that more than 60,000 people were detained across Iran, while some independent sources have put the number summoned, detained or interrogated at more than 100,000.
Iranian judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir said in February that authorities had issued more than 10,000 orders sending cases for prosecution and around 9,000 indictments against people detained during the unrest.
The report comes amid mounting international concern over prosecutions and executions connected to the protests.
UN human rights chief Volker Türk said this week that Iran had executed at least 56 people on national security-related charges since March 19, including 27 in protest-related cases. He urged Iranian authorities to halt executions and move towards abolishing the death penalty.
