Runaway

A film by Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Great Britain | 2001 | 87 minutes | Color | 35mm/DVD | Subtitled | Order No. 02750

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SYNOPSIS

“RUNAWAY is a powerful and heart-breaking documentary about a group of young runaway girls who are taken to a women's shelter in Tehran, Iran. The film focuses on the sufferings of young girls who struggle to free themselves from the tyrannical and abusive power of their families, mainly their fathers, brothers, and stepfathers. The sisterly feelings of the girls towards each other, their spiritual strength, their courage to rebel, and their wit are shown with a great degree of compassion and empathy in the film. The filmmakers have beautifully criticized the patriarchal system of family and the destructive power of male family members over the lives of their daughters and sisters. One can imagine that the issue of confinement and abuse goes beyond the issue of class when it comes to the problem of domestic violence and the desire to control women through anger, aggression and madness.” - Mehrnaz Saeed, Colombia College Chicago

PRESS

“…a compelling mingling of feminist anthropology and documentary filmmaking…its powerful images remain with you long after the credits have run.”

Shiva Balaghi, Associate Director Kevorkian Center, NYU

“…engrossing…[It] reveals the compassionate side of Islam rather than following the Western media’s more clinched demonizing, and leaves the viewer free to decide.”

Derek Elley Variety

“Thought-provoking documentary…Longinotto and Hosseini have created an honest and open account…excellent.”

Inside Out Film

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Joris Ivens Award Nomination
  • Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, Jury Prize for Best Documentary
  • Osnabruck Film Festival, Children's Rights Award
  • Zanzibar International Film Festival, Silver Dhow Award
  • Margaret Mead Film Festival
  • Sheffield Documentary Film Festival
  • Edinburgh International Film Festival
  • Hot Docs Canadian Documentary Film Festival
  • Munich International Documentary Film Festival
  • Thessaloniki International Film Festival
  • New Zealand Film Festival
  • DocAviv International Film Festival
  • Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival
  • International Festival on Human Rights One World
  • It’s All True Sao Paolo International Documentary Festival
  • Newport Beach International Film Festival
  • Seoul Human Rights Film Festival
  • Seoul Women’s Film Festival
  • Iranian Diaspora Film Festival
  • Chicago International Film Festival

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Kim Longinotto

Kim Longinotto (born 1952) is a British documentary filmmaker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto studied camera and directing at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England, where she now tutors occasionally.

Longinotto was born to an Italian father and a Welsh mother; her father was a photographer who later went bankrupt. At the age of 10 she was sent to a draconian all-girls boarding school, where she found it hard to make friends due to the mistress forbidding anyone to talk to her for a term after she became lost during a school trip. After a period of homelessness, Longinotto went on to Essex University to study English and European literature and later followed friend and future filmmaker, Nick Broomfield to the National Film and Television School. While studying, she made a documentary about her boarding school that was shown at the London Film Festival, since when she has continued to be a prolific documentary filmmaker.

Longinotto is an observational filmmaker. Observational cinema, also known as direct cinema, free cinema or cinema verite, usually excludes certain documentary techniques such as advanced planning, scripting, staging, narration, lighting, reenactment and interviewing. Longinotto’s unobtrusiveness, which is an important part of observational documentary, gives the women on camera a certain voice and presence that may not have emerged with another documentary genre. She has received a number of awards for her films over the years, including a BAFTA for her documentary PINK SARIS.

Among her more than 20 films, she has followed a teenager struggling to become a wrestling star in 2000’s GAEA GIRLS, challenged the tradition of female genital mutilation in Kenya in 2002’s THE DAY I WILL NEVER FORGET, and told the story of an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family in 2013’s SALMA. In 2015's DREAMCATCHER Longinotto looks at the life and work of a former sex worker who rescues Chicago girls from the street.

Her new film SHOOTING THE MAFIA, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. (3/19)

Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Dr. Ziba Mir-Hosseini is a legal anthropologist, specializing in Islamic law, gender and development. She has a BA in Sociology from Tehran University (1974) and a PhD in Social Anthropology from University of Cambridge (1980). She is Professorial Research Associate at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, University of London. She has held numerous research fellowships and visiting professorships, including a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2004-5), and Hauser Global Law Visiting Professor at New York University (2002-8). Dr. Mir-Hosseini is a founding member of Musawah Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family.

Her publications include Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco (I. B. Tauris, 1993, 2002), Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999), (with Richard Tapper) Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform (I. B. Tauris, 2006), and (with Vanja Hamzic) Control and Sexuality: the Revival of Zina Laws in Muslim Contexts (Women Living Under Muslim Laws, 2010). She has also directed (with Kim Longinotto) two award-winning feature-length documentary films on contemporary issues in Iran: DIVORCE IRANIAN STYLE (1998) and RUNAWAY (2001). (8/14)

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