SONITA

SONITA
IRAN 2015

Festival Screenings:
Thu May 26 | 6:30pm | SIFF Cinema Uptown
Sat May 28 | 1:00pm | Lincoln Square Cinemas
Sat June 4 | 3:30pm | Shoreline Community College

An amazing documentary. We are introduced to Sonita, a teen-aged refugee from Afganistan barely getting by in Tehran, who wants to be a rap singer but whose family wants her to go back to Afganistan for an arranged marriage. The bride price they will get for her is a big part of the calculus. So we get a rap song about bride prices. If you think about the globally diverse cultural threads that are part of this story, it is mind blowing. Interesting, also, that people escape to Iran, it is a more heterogeneous and open society than Afganistan, where 15 years of US involvement has just made things worse. My favorite scene: kids in school are assigned to draw a picture of their passport if they could live anyplace in the world. Sonita draws her’s as a US passport, and says that this will allow her to go anywhere. Except Iran, as the teacher points out.