WATCH DOCS FESTIVAL ONLINE
This year's festival runs from 4-13 December and is payable, while a few older films will be available 14-31 December free of charge (the 20 Years of WATCH DOCS section).
SUNLESS SHADOWS
Watchable. Teenage girls frolic, learn pottery or play antics with a water hose in a yard surrounded by greenery. They tell their stories in gentle, feminine voices, kind of seductive. They're in prison. Most of them have killed a male family member. Each of them used to be beaten and saw their mother battered. They appear to suffer from Stockholm syndrome. It's just hard to comprehend how they can manifest so much love to the oppressors they've murdered. They're not sure if freedom is better than the prison. Safer it is not. A picture of a society where men hold the power over women's life or death - literally, even the law is constructed in such a way that you can be pardoned only if all the relatives of the deceased agree, otherwise you get capital punishment or, again, subject to the relatives' approval, can pay "blood money" and be acquitted. Whether in ordinary life or in prison, women's lives are in the hands of men who show little compassion even to their mothers. Should be harrowing but it's depicted so placidly it fails to shock. One of them committed suicide after the film shooting ended, as you read on the final screen.
The film, in Persian, had tiny subtitles.
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