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SUNLESS SHADOWS

By Mehrdad OSKOUEI

DREAMLAB FILMS - as SALES All rights

Documentary - Completed 2019

We follow the lives of a group of teenage girls serving time in an Iranian juvenile detention center for the murder of a male family member. With the camera as witness, they reveal their innermost thoughts, feelings and doubts.

Festivals
& Awards

32nd IDFA, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 2019

International Competition, Best Director Award

CPH:DOX 2020

Justice

- Year of production
- 2019
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- IRAN, NORWAY
- Languages
- PERSIAN
- Duration
- 74 mn
- Director(s)
- Mehrdad OSKOUEI
- Writer(s)
- Mehrdad OSKOUEI
- Producer(s)
- Mehrdad OSKOUEI (Oskouei Film Production)
- Synopsis
- In an Iranian juvenile detention center, a group of adolescent girls are serving time for having murdered their father, husband or another male family member. Filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei managed to build up a remarkable relationship with these inmates, whose frank conversations and playful interactions he observes, and who gradually open up about the consequences of, and sometimes the reasons for, their terrible act.
  Mehrdad occasionally leaves them alone with the camera, allowing it to become a means for them to address both their victims and their accomplices, three of the girls having killed their fathers with the help of their mothers. The mothers await execution elsewhere.
  Unlike their mothers' somber pall, the atmosphere in the girls' living quarters, shared cell with teen-bedroom feel, classroom and grass-lined courtyard where a brood of ducklings scamper about, seems almost carefree. It gradually becomes apparent, however, that apart from being a prison, this closed, all-female environment is also a shelter from an aggressively male-dominated society.

SUNLESS SHADOWS

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards