Sonita
Description
Like her hip-hop heroes Eminem and Yas, aspiring rapper Sonita Alizadeh drops some serious rhymes from an unusual perspective—in her case, the Tehran Society for the Protection of Working and Street Children, where she struggles just to get by as an undocumented Afghan refugee. Having fled the horrors of the Taliban, she and her elder sister have found some measure of stability in the relative calm of Iran’s bustling capital. However, Sonita is a teenage girl from a poor family—one of many at the shelter—and hence at constant risk of being sold into marriage under the Afghan “bride price” system. While her mother sends ominous messages from abroad attempting to pressure her into a marriage-for-cash so her brother can afford to ‘buy’ his own wife, Sonita marshals what resources she can to record her songs of protest for posterity. Winner of both a World Cinema Grand Jury Prize and an Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Sonita offers an intimate and unflinching look at a fiery young talent who calls upon her greatest passion—rap music—to expose the nightmarish patriarchal control of her home country, fighting for her freedom and the futures of countless more. —Paul Meyers
Filmmaker Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami studied cinema and animation at Tehran Art University, where her research culminated in the book-length study Animated Documentary: New Ways to Express. Her films include Cyanosis (2007), Born 20 Minutes Late (2010), Going Up the Stairs (2011) and Sonita (2015), which received the Audience Award at both IDFA and the Sundance Film Festival.
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/158394266?autoplay=1Film Details
Language Farsi
Year 2015
Runtime 91
Country Germany/Switzerland/Iran
Director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami
Producer Gerd Haag
Editor Rune Schweitzer
Cinematographer Behrouz Badrouj, Ali Mohammad Ghasemi, Mohammad Haddadi, Arastoo Givi, Torben Bernard, Parviz Arefi, Ala Mohseni
Music Moritz Denis