Be My Voice, a documentary about Iranian women's fight against the forced wearing of the hijab, has won the Amnesty International Slovenia Human Rights Film Award as the 25th Festival of Documentary Film in Ljubljana.

The 2021 film by Iranian-Swedish director Nahid Persson brings a story about Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and activist who has had to flee to the US, from where she now leads Iranian women in the fight for their rights. She has become the voice of millions of Iranian women who resist the hijab.

The jury hailed the film as a fusion of activism and documentarism saying it transcends the portrait of an individual activist to draw a portrait of the entire Iranian society.

"It gives us effective, emotionally articulated information about the Iranian dictatorship, in which women's human rights are one of the basic mechanisms for maintaining this dictatorship."

Persson said after the Ljubljana screening of her film that the West must clearly distance itself from the Iranian regime. She thinks cooperation with Iran is worse than the regime itself.

She believes people outside Iran can help by spreading the word about what is going on and "by putting pressure on own governments to take action". The regime finances terrorism, and if your "solve" Iran, you also solve much of this problem.

The director believes the regime of the religious leaders cannot be changed, although she feels it realises young generations will be hard to stop now.

The jury awarded a special mention to Innocence, a film by Israeli director Guy Davidi about how the Israeli authorities indoctrinate and militarise young people.

The jury said that Davidi clearly shows "an aversion to the militarisation of children" while exposing the nationalist role of the state.