She plays one of the protagonists of the Israeli series Tehran, currently broadcast on the Apple TV + platform, in a role tailor-made for her, who speaks Hebrew but also Farsi due to her Iranian origins. The actress and singer Liraz Charhi plays an agent of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, in charge of supporting on the ground one of her colleagues, a hacker sent to the Iranian capital to neutralize an aerial radar and allow Israeli planes to bomb a nuclear power plant.
“She wonders if she’s Israeli or Iranian, or both. It’s my character’s dilemma, and it’s the story of my life ”, says the 42-year-old musician, born in Israel, whose parents left Iran shortly before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, at a time when the Jewish state and Iran had close diplomatic and economic ties.
An odyssey
His new album, Zan (which means “women” in Farsi), the fourth of her career and the second in Farsi, is released on November 13, and recounts everything that has been lost since the mullahs’ dictatorship designated Israel as its enemy.
The production of this album was already a challenge for the singer from a community originally from Iran representing barely 20,000 people in Israel, who chose to abandon Hebrew, the language of her first two records. But this decision tells more than a daring musical option: it is an odyssey in itself and, in its own way, a spy novel.
The singer used encrypted messaging to record with her musicians, passing through Istanbul and Berlin to make bank transfers.
Liraz Charhi has recorded with Iranian musicians based in Tehran, knowing that an Iranian citizen is prohibited from having any contact with an Israeli. In May, Parliament passed a new law banning all cooperation with the Zionist regime, which should be seen as “Equal to hatred towards God and corruption on Earth”. The singer used encrypted messaging to record with her musicians, passing through Istanbul and Berlin to make bank transfers.
“You can imagine that I worked in all discretion with them, explains Liraz Charhi. But I couldn’t sleep at night. I was afraid that we would learn that the Iranians had worked with the Israelis. For them that would mean prison, torture or worse. When some realized this threat, they threw in the towel. They said to me, “Liraz, you can keep my song, but we will never be able to talk to each other again.” Some have disappeared, going so far as to modify their profile on social networks. ”
You have 48.75% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
