90
Variety by Guy Lodge
It quietly but pointedly interrogates the notion of victimhood, while tacitly letting a damning essay on Iranian gender politics and hierarchies emerge through the words of his subjects.
Sunless Shadows
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
This humane documentary explores the lives of a group of adolescent girls in an Iranian juvenile detention center serving their sentences for the grave crime of murdering their father, their husband or another male family member.
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What are critics saying?
90
Screen Daily
It’s a picture of love that has led first to desperation and incarceration, and now to a sort of suspended grief, as the girls and mothers face an uncertain future, unsure whether they will ever be reunited, hope mixing with fear to the last.
90
The New York Times by Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Mehrdad Oskouei’s latest documentary, Sunless Shadows, is a startling, raw confrontation with Iran’s patriarchy.
90
Screen Daily by Amber Wilkinson
It’s a picture of love that has led first to desperation and incarceration, and now to a sort of suspended grief, as the girls and mothers face an uncertain future, unsure whether they will ever be reunited, hope mixing with fear to the last.
83
The A.V. Club by A.A. Dowd
This is something different: an acknowledgement that, for many young women in Iran, prison may offer an escape from everyday horrors, to say nothing of the paradoxical freedom it affords them.
75
Slant Magazine by Diego Semerene
Redolent of Claude Lanzmann’s approach, Mehrdad Oskouei strips his images to their barest bones as his subjects openly speak about their traumas, as if trying to avoid aestheticizing their pain.
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