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Iran, Norway · 2022
1h 14m
Director Mehrdad Oskouei
Starring
Genre Documentary
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The New York Times by Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Mehrdad Oskouei’s latest documentary, Sunless Shadows, is a startling, raw confrontation with Iran’s patriarchy.