Movies in the Mountains: Sonita — the boundaries of documentary blur in story of female teenage Afghan aspiring rapper

By Revelstoke Performing Arts Centre

Sonita is the second in Revelstoke Multicultural Society’s Movies in the Mountains series, which brings high quality films from the Toronto Film Festival to Revelstoke.

Directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami and filmed mainly in Iran, Sonita is a rare and real insight into the mind of this particularly outspoken female Afghan teenager who was a refugee in Iran.

While Sonita Alizadeh dreams of becoming a star, she struggles with the expectations of her gender in an oppressive culture. Maghami met with Sonita over three years to develop Sonita. which focuses on Sonita’s artistic evolution from timid rapper to empowered activist.

Sonita took home two major prizes at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, including the grand jury prize and the audience award for best world cinema documentary.

Sonita. Image courtesy Women Make Movies

“The award was when I started working with Sonita. Every day she was awarding me with her energy, and the emotion that I had, and for being, somehow, my daughter – the daughter I never had,” director Ghaem Maghami was quoted as saying at the premiere in Utah.

Sonita is Maghami’s sixth documentary and likely one of the most memorable. The usual boundaries of documentary are blurred because Ghaem Maghami spends some time in front of the camera and pays off Sonita’s distant mother $2,000 to stop her being married off for money.

“I don’t want to make this a habit in my filmmaking but then if that situation would happen again I would do the same,” Ghaem Maghami said in an interview with The Iris.

Event details:

Revelstoke Performing Arts Centre at 1007 Vernon Avenue on Wednesday, October 26, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: single film $8, three film pass: $20 or a six film pass: $30

Movie Synopsis:

Director: Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami

Stars: Sonita Alizadeh, Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami

Runtime: 90 minutes

If 18-year old Sonita had a say in things, Michael Jackson would be her father and Rihanna her mother. Instead, she is an Afghan refugee in Iran, a passionate music lover in a culture where women are forbidden to sing.

Sonita captures her dream of being a famous rapper in her scrapbook. For the time being, her only fans are the other teenage girls in the Tehran shelter. There, Sonita gets counseling for the traumas she has suffered and guidance in shaping her future.

When she attempts to launch a career as a rapper, her conservative family intervenes. Desperate for money and shocked by her musical aspirations, they summon her back to Afghanistan to be sold into an arranged marriage for $9,000.

When director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami takes Sonita on a suspenseful cross-border journey in pursuit of a U.S. scholarship, this charismatic young woman must learn to defy her family’s expectations and channel her frustrations into rousing song.

Sonita is one of the year’s most uplifting films, a soaring portrait of an extraordinary young woman discovering the power of her voice.

What the reviewers say:

5 stars from The Guardian’s Nigel M Smith

“[Sonita] wants to follow in Rihanna’s footsteps, but as an artist she couldn’t be more different. Sonita doesn’t rap about love or fame – she raps defiantly about her experience as an Afghan teenager at odds with her sexist surroundings. She’s an activist, only she’s too young to really know it.”

Neil Young at The Hollywood Reporter

“The tale of how Sonita Alizadeh — who at the start of the film has lived as an undocumented Afghan refugee in Iran for over a decade — ends up enrolling at Wasatch Academy in the Beehive State is a convoluted, unlikely and inspiring one. It involves overcoming all manner of circumstantial, familial and bureaucratic hurdles. And it also involves the crucial involvement, at more than one juncture, of writer-director Ghaem Maghami, who basically pays off Sonita’s implacably stubborn mother in order to delay a seemingly inevitable forced marriage.”

Fionnuala Halligan, chief film critic at Screen Daily

“Everyone falls a little in love with Sonita in this film, and audiences should follow suit. From nothing, she has made a family of sorts, and the head of the NGO has become her substitute mother. No matter what happens to her, Sonita is going to have to leave them all behind.”

Nick Allen – RogerEbert.com

“Sonita puts a defiant face and expressive voice to a resistance that needs to be as loud as possible.”