‘Rebel’ Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani plays a rebel in the upcoming The Girls of the Sun

A ‘rebel’ of sorts in her own life, Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani is all set to portray a Kurdish fighter in the French director, Eva Husson’s The Girls of the Sun. As Bahar, the commander-in-chief of an all-women battalion - known as the The Girls of the Sun - she is all set to recapture a town taken by extremists.

This role comes to the versatile, Paris-based Farahani after Pirates Of The Caribbean and Salazar’s Revenge. This year, she will also be seen in The Upside, and the zombie thriller, The Night Eats The World.

Farahani’s character in The Girls of the Sun has been inspired by real-life Kurdish women who were taken hostage by Islamic fighters in Syria and Iraq, but who later took up arms against their captors.

Golshifteh Farahani in a scene from her French-Afghan film, The Patience Stone.

Incidentally, Farahani’s own life has been no less adventurous. At school in Teheran, she protested against lack of heating, and took love letters from one to another playing Cupid. At 16, she tonsured her head, because she did not want to wear a scarf and cycled the streets of her city - unthinkable in a nation run by conservative clergy.

At 20, she acted with Tom Cruise in Body of Lies. The mullahs were not pleased at all. She fled to Paris, divorced her husband and made up her mind to enjoy freedom to its fullest in the French ambience. In 2012, Farahani posed nude for a French magazine, Madame Figaro. And appeared topless in a film by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, titled Bodies and Souls.

That was the last straw for the Iranian government which then banned her entry into her homeland.

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