Witnessing as an almost impossible endeavor and the limited access to an origin of traumatic events more generally, has been the main focus of research in Trauma Studies. The implications of this claim for cinema has resulted in the paradox of the paralysis of traumatic experience coupled with the challenges of representing the absences attendant with the visuality of trauma. However, most recently, critics have opened a line of investigation into the framework of performativity whereby the witness in a narrative is thought of as a performer rather than merely a victim of trauma. This paper interrogates that kind of performativity of witnessing in Jafar Panahi’s 2003 film, Tala-ye Sorkh (Crimson Gold). Indeed, the combination of performativity along with a sense of a traumatized main protagonist characterizes Panahi’s antihero, Hussain. The affective representation of Hussain’s everyday engagements invites viewers to not only be moved by, but move in the narrative enunciation of his experiences. As a result, the opening scene of his suicide sets the stage for what Susan Sontag calls “an iconography of suffering,” and an already mourned for Hussain acts as a witness to the story preceding the eventual denouement. By emphasizing the performative act of witnessing, I call attention to the ways that the main character Hussain’s witnessing of the inhabitants, or characters of Tehran, incite our own witnessing as film viewers. By doing so, I argue that Panahi’s aesthetic moves that make Hussain act the role of witness allows viewers to simultaneously witness the everyday social class and gender dynamics that is constitutive of postwar Iranian society. Ultimately, I enable a reading of the critique of social class and masculinity in the film not merely as an attempt at reflecting social ills, but a way of highlighting the potential power of enacting a kind of social change through cinema by our own engagement with and attainment of a witness’s insight.