PARIS    -    One man mimes his bones being broken, a woman recounts her surrender to religious brainwashing, and a third man replicates his confinement in a tiny prison cell. With his new documentary “Where God is Not”, French-Iranian filmmaker Mehran Tama­don hopes that the testimonies of former detainees who say they were tortured in Iran will “unsettle” some of their persecu­tors. All recount abuse that occurred before the protests that are now shaking Iran, from the brutal repression of the 1980s in the im­mediate aftermath of the revolution up until the last decade. But “everything I am filming speaks of today,” said the director who was born to communist parents in Iran in 1972, but fled to France with his mother as a child. “Right now, there are people being tortured in prison in Iran.” Iranian authorities have arrested thousands since nationwide pro­tests broke out following the September 16 death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for allegedly breaching the coun­try’s strict dress rules for women. Security forces have also killed 537 people during the crackdown, Norway-based Iran Human Rights watchdog says. “For 43 years,” since the 1979 revolution that installed an Islam­ic theocracy in the country, Iran has been in the grips of a “totalitarian system”, said Tama­don, an architect who turned to cinema in the first decade of the millennium when he lived in Tehran. After 2009 documentary “Bassidji” (“Basij”) in which he interviewed members of the paramilitary volunteer force, the athe­ist engaged in conversation with four clerics for his 2014 work “Iranian”. The authorities were so unhappy with him that they con­fiscated his passports. After they returned them to him in 2012, he decided to leave Iran, where he says violence has become so ingrained that, “like a Russian roulette”, it can strike at any time.