‘Sunless Shadows’ named best at Batumi Int’l Art-House filmfest

Iranian award-winning documentary ‘Sunless Shadows’ has been named best film at the 11th Middle East Now (Festival of Cinema and Contemporary Culture on the Middle East) in Italy.

The 74-minute documentary film, made in 2019 by Mehrdad Oskouee, was screened at “Focus on Iran”, a section that was one of the initiatives in memory of Felicetta Ferraro, the former Italian cultural attaché to Iran who died on June 2, 2019 in Florence.

‘Sunless Shadows’ is the story of five young women who are jailed in a small juvenile detention center for murder. Each woman describes the circumstance which led to the murder and her motives to do so.

‘Starvation’ by Zahra Rostampur, ‘Shouting at the Wind’ by Siavash Jamali and Ata Mehrad, ‘Command’ by Farshid Abdi, ‘Elephant Bird’ by Amir-Masud Soheili, ‘Zhirleh’ by Bahar Rouhani, ‘Life Is Gone with the Wind’ by Siavash Saedpanah and Omid Qaribi, ‘The Wasteland” by Ahmad Bahrami and several other films were also screened at the ‘Focus on Iran’ section.   

October has been an award-filled month for ‘Sunless Shadows’ as it received the jury’s special mention of the 16th ZagrebDox International Documentary Film Festival in Croatia as well as the main prize of the 8th CinéDOC-Tbilisi Documentary Film Festival in Georgia.

‘Sunless Shadows’ also opened the 2019 Int’l Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which was the film’s debut international screening, leading to the festival's best director award.

Oskouee’s doc will also head to the 18th edition of the Zagreb Film Festival to be held on November 2020 in Croatia.

The 11th Middle East Now Festival, postponed from April, took place on October 6-11, showcasing cinema, art and culture from the region and North Africa.

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