A controversial social drama by Kurdish filmmaker Pouran Derakhshande swept up the four main awards at this year’s San Francisco Iranian Film Festival. Hush, Girls Don’t Scream took Best film, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Screenplay.
Set in Iran, the film deals with paedophilia, a taboo in the Islamic Republic where victims’ families often choose not to take legal action against perpetrators for fear of stigmatization in an often deeply conservative society.
On the evening of her wedding, Shirin (played by Tannaz Tabatabayi) stabs a man to death. As she appears before her future husband in full wedding dress with a splatter of blood across her chest, Shirin immediately confesses her crime.
As the narrative continues, the question of perpetrator and victim becomes more established when Shirin tells the story of an 8 year old girl who has been repeatedly sexually abused by a male stalker.
The little girl, as the viewer gradually comes to realise, is Shirin in her childhood when she tried unsuccessfully to communicate to her parents and her school teachers about the ongoing crime.
When the conservative society fails to undo the injustice committed against little Shirin, the adult Shirin takes matters into her own hands to protect, she says, other young girls from future assaults.
Though the question of paedophilia is highly stigmatized in Iran - including in its Kurdistan - the film won Best Film Award at Iran’s prestigious Fajr International Film Festival in 2012. It also picked up Best Feature-Length Award of the fourth London Iranian film festival.
Born in 1951 in the Iranian Kurdish city of Kermashah, Derakhshande has made memorable motion pictures including Relationship (1986), A Little Bird of Happiness (1987), Passing Through the Dust (1988), Lost Time (1989), A Love Without Frontier (1998), Candle in the Wind (2003), Wet Dream (2005), Eternal Children (2006)
A graduate of cinema school in Tehran, Derakhshande started her movie career by making documentaries for the Kermanshah television and subsequently for the Tehran TV.
Hush, Girls Don’t Scream has garnered mostly positive reviews from film critics. On review aggregate website IMDb, the film holds an overall 74 percent approval rating based on viewer votes.
“The only area in which the film loosens its tightly controlled argumentation to become as passionately anguished as the subject seems to merit is in the work of Tabatabayi, and of the astonishing child actress who plays Shirin as an 8-year-old, terrorized by her pedophile stalker. Their pain feels so raw that it can be hard to watch. But of course, we have to,” film magazine Variety wrote about the movie.
Set in Iran, the film deals with paedophilia, a taboo in the Islamic Republic where victims’ families often choose not to take legal action against perpetrators for fear of stigmatization in an often deeply conservative society.
On the evening of her wedding, Shirin (played by Tannaz Tabatabayi) stabs a man to death. As she appears before her future husband in full wedding dress with a splatter of blood across her chest, Shirin immediately confesses her crime.
As the narrative continues, the question of perpetrator and victim becomes more established when Shirin tells the story of an 8 year old girl who has been repeatedly sexually abused by a male stalker.
The little girl, as the viewer gradually comes to realise, is Shirin in her childhood when she tried unsuccessfully to communicate to her parents and her school teachers about the ongoing crime.
When the conservative society fails to undo the injustice committed against little Shirin, the adult Shirin takes matters into her own hands to protect, she says, other young girls from future assaults.
Though the question of paedophilia is highly stigmatized in Iran - including in its Kurdistan - the film won Best Film Award at Iran’s prestigious Fajr International Film Festival in 2012. It also picked up Best Feature-Length Award of the fourth London Iranian film festival.
Born in 1951 in the Iranian Kurdish city of Kermashah, Derakhshande has made memorable motion pictures including Relationship (1986), A Little Bird of Happiness (1987), Passing Through the Dust (1988), Lost Time (1989), A Love Without Frontier (1998), Candle in the Wind (2003), Wet Dream (2005), Eternal Children (2006)
A graduate of cinema school in Tehran, Derakhshande started her movie career by making documentaries for the Kermanshah television and subsequently for the Tehran TV.
Hush, Girls Don’t Scream has garnered mostly positive reviews from film critics. On review aggregate website IMDb, the film holds an overall 74 percent approval rating based on viewer votes.
“The only area in which the film loosens its tightly controlled argumentation to become as passionately anguished as the subject seems to merit is in the work of Tabatabayi, and of the astonishing child actress who plays Shirin as an 8-year-old, terrorized by her pedophile stalker. Their pain feels so raw that it can be hard to watch. But of course, we have to,” film magazine Variety wrote about the movie.
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