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Ali from Copenhagen can win one of the world's biggest film awards - but he can not return to Iran | Movies & Series | DR Danish-Iranian Ali Abbasi has made a film that may mean that he can no longer visit his family in Iran. Of The woman on the street smiles flirtatiously at him as he rides past on his motorcycle. He stops and initiates a conversation. He looks like a customer in search of a bang, but the gray-haired Saeed Hanaei has other plans. Once he has driven the woman home to his apartment, she does not come alive from there. He simply suffocates her. Like he has done with all the other women he has picked up in Iran's holy city Mashhad. This is the focus of Danish-Iranian Ali Abbasi's new film 'Holy Spider', which this week had its world premiere at the Film Festival. The film has already received good reviews during the festival, and tomorrow Ali Abbasi can win the main prize, the Palme d'Or. who just killed in Mashhad in the beginning of .Ali Abbasi himself lived in Iran at this time and the case really set something in motion in him. Not least because the killer in certain religious and conservative circles was praised for his crimes, says the director. Born in the Iranian capital, Tehran, in 1981. Director and screenwriter. Moved to Stockholm in Sweden in 2002, where he completed a bachelor's degree in 2007. in architecture. Then moved to Copenhagen, where in 2011 he graduated from the director's line at the Danish Film School. Has made three feature films; the horror 'Shelley', the Swedish-Danish 'Grænse', which won the main prize in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Festival, and now the thriller 'Holy Spider' .- What he did was quite shocking, but the one he got afterwards was almost even more shocking - and that was what really caught my attention, says Ali Abbasi. - When he was captured and was in court, the conservative part of Iranian society, the newspapers and some political actors began to call him a hero . There was, in fact, a great deal of doubt as to whether he would be punished at all, and it was a question of whether they should give him a hidden identity. ", and so there were several who could see a sense in it. It made Ali Abbasi wonder what it is for a society that creates such a man, and how parts of a society can blue-stamp a serial killer's murder on 16 women as being "not just okay, but good". Ali Abbasi, who has previously distinguished himself with the Danish-Swedish film 'Border', has not made 'Holy Spider' as a direct critique of Iranian society.- I do not make films to criticize society or to say what is right and wrong, he emphasizes. On the other hand, from the beginning it has been important for the director to focus on the misogyny that prevails in certain places in his home country. Obviously, if you're going to kill women, it is misogyny in its purest form. So it just felt natural as a theme in the film, he says. I'm pretty critical of Iranian films in general because they reproduce that oppression. Ali Abbasi, director But the film is not just about something as macabre as murder of women in Iran - and the surprising acceptance of them. It is also very generally about inequality and oppression of women.- If you as a woman do something I get excited about, then that is your problem. It's not my problem that I'm looking at you - it's your problem that you're showing too much. I have always thought that was so absurd, says Ali Abbasi. And that is precisely the image of women that is reproduced uncritically in Iranian films, Ali Abbasi points out. In other words, he misses a more realistic look at Iranian women on the big screen. - I'm quite critical of Iranian films in general because they reproduce that oppression. In Iranian films, women always have five meters of fabric around their heads and sleep with all their clothes on and do not really have a body, he says. This is not how he remembers it from his own family, who are otherwise also religious. distorted image of Iran. I have a family that is very religious, and that's not how you do it. It is very rare for a religious woman to wear a headscarf in front of her husband. One may like to criticize that women are not allowed to play football and such - but one must not show their hair, he adds in amazement. In 'Holy Spider', on the other hand, there is nothing that is hidden or secret. Here are both long loose locks, nudity and sex, which are already three broken taboos for the list, as Ali Abbasi puts it with a smile. But to be allowed to make such a film in Iran is impossible. In any case, it never managed to get that permission, so Ali Abbasi therefore recorded 'Holy Spider' in Jordan. And it may well be that everyone claps at him, but the film also has the consequence that the director who lives in Copenhagen , can not visit his mother in Iran ever. It's way too risky because he does not know how the Iranian regime will react to his film.- I do not even think they would deny me access - they would probably say: "Hey, welcome. Let's go down in this one basement a few months and find out what you really meant. "That chance he will not take. But he is actually even more worried about the actor Mehdi Bajestani, who plays the serial killer. He lives in Iran, where he is a well-known actor. - The risk he has taken is like crazy. So I'm very worried - and not just because he can not get a job there. I think it can have much more serious consequences. It could be prison and everything, Ali Abbasi fears. Has it made you consider whether all this is worth the film? - Yes, it has taken me ten years to think about this. It's a difficult decision, because a large part of me is Iranian. I have a big to my culture. I also have a large Scandinavian part, but for me it is not as much not to be able to go to Iran or to cut the ribbon that way.- But if I do not, me who is so privileged and lives in a free country and have access to funds and have a profit, who the hell should do that? The Palme d'Or will be awarded on Saturday - and 'Holy Spider' will have its Danish premiere in October.