Japanese festival screening Iranian ‘Starless Dreams’

The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) in Japan has been set to screen Mehrdad Oskouei’s award-winning and much admired ‘Starless Dreams’.

Oskouei himself had travelled to Japan to take part at the Japanese festival which scheduled to screen the dovumentary on October 7 and 9, 2017.

‘Starless Dreams’ follows a group of under-18-year-old girls taken into a rehabilitation and detention center on the outskirts of Tehran for a variety of reasons ranging from drug dealing and trafficking to pick-pocketing and manslaughter.

Though bored with their incarcerated life they are, nevertheless, scared about what might happen to them once outside; as the New Year approaches, they all hope to celebrate it with their families.

Director Oskouei, one of Iran’s most prominent filmmakers, spent seven years securing access to this all-female facility, and he makes the awkwardness of being a male filmmaker in their environment a poignant and powerful aspect of his project.

The 76-minute doc has grabbed a number of prestigious awards and titles from various film events. Just in 2016, the film won the Amnesty International Film Prize at the 66th Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlinale-Generation 14plus in Germany as well as the True Vision Award at the 13th True/False Film Festival in the US.

Oskouei’s production has also received the Grierson Award for the best documentary at the 60th BFI London Film Festival and the Children’s Rights Award at the 31st Osnabruck Independent Film Festival in October.

Launched in October 1989, the YIDFF is a documentary film festival held biennially in Yamagata, Japan.

The festival is one of the longest running documentary film festivals in the world and one of the most distinguished ones in Asia.

Its emphasis is on showcasing best achievements in documentary filmmaking, as well as promoting and popularizing the genre and documentary filmmaking in the region.

The 2017 edition of the YIDFF has been set for October 5-12 in Yamagata, Japan.

MG/MF