Prison-Industrial Complex

‘Starless Dreams’ Offers an Intimate Look at Iran Through Its Juvenile Detention Centers

In ‘Starless Dreams,’ we learn about the lives of teenage girls inside Iran’s juvenile detention centers, but we also learn how director Mehrdad Oskouei attempts to change hearts and minds in his own country. It’s an attempt that’s packaged for his fellow citizens rather than foreigners and, watching the film as an outsider is a complicated, multilayered experience.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Starless Dreams is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

You can learn a lot about a culture by listening to the way its inhabitants discuss their disagreements – what they do and don’t say; how they couch their arguments; which topics are tacitly understood to be out of bounds. In Starless Dreams, we learn about the lives of teenage girls inside Iran’s juvenile detention centers, but we also learn how director Mehrdad Oskouei attempts to change hearts and minds in his own country. It’s an attempt that’s packaged for his fellow citizens rather than foreigners and, watching the film as an outsider is a complicated, multilayered experience.

The documentary, which has won multiple awards since its release, including the Amnesty International Film Prize, follows a group of girls who live in a correctional center outside Tehran. For the most part, the girls who appear in Starless Dreams could just as well be living in many other parts of the world. The stories they tell are all too familiar – they come from poor families where there faced violence and substance abuse; they got into crime through their husbands or boyfriends; they were molested, raped, or assaulted at some point; their futures look bleak and “pain drips from the walls.”

The detention center is, in some ways, an oasis from a world they don’t want to return to. Living communally in a dormitory-style room, the girls Oskouei interviews laugh, sing, and build snowmen together. They comfort each other and bond over their shared experiences, good and bad. Most are afraid to go back to their families or back to the street when they’re finally released. All of them harbor a dark, painful story about how they got to this place.

One by one, they open up to Oskouei with incredible candor, revealing that the brave face they put on masks a terrible loneliness and pain. They regret what they’ve done and what’s happened to them – what they’ve become because of what’s happened to them – and they speak to the camera as if this is the first time anyone has asked how they feel. Based on what we hear, it may very well be.

Oskouei doesn’t interview the guards or correctional workers, but we occasionally hear them speak off-camera, or see them drift across the screen. In one scene, one of the girls who’s just been released, tells a female guard that she’s afraid to go outside and see her father – afraid of what he’ll do, afraid she’ll have to run away again, afraid she’ll get back into drugs. The guard tells her, in a frustrated, exasperated tone, that she’s no longer their responsibility, even if she kills herself.

It’s not a very nice thing to say, but it’s reflective of the way prison systems work in many countries, including Canada and the United States. Prisons aren’t built to address the social, systemic factors that lead people to commit crimes in the first place – they’re just meant to punish criminals and send them on their way. The transition plan we see in Starless Dreams could be described as “putting child abuse victims back in the hands of child abusers,” since the rules require that someone from the detainee’s family come to retrieve her. One of Oskouei’s subjects initially refuses to identify herself because she doesn’t want her family to find her again – she says that she ran away because her uncle molested her and that, when she told her mother, her mother called her a liar and beat her. When she eventually relents and the guards contact her family, an off-camera voice says, “I’ll tell them they have to be nice to you,” which is the kind of intervention that doesn’t help at all.

It’s clear that most of these girls need a social worker more than they need a detention center, but that’s not what the system is equipped to provide them. I understand the guards’ frustration – they can’t be everything to everyone; it’s not their job – but there’s something heartbreaking about the way these girls hope the adults in their lives will help them, only to be disappointed each time. There’s a sense in which Oskouei, who they call “Uncle Mehrdad,” may be the only adult to take a genuine interest in their welfare. While he’s doing important work with this documentary, he also packs up his camera and departs after a few weeks, leaving us with the question of what happens after.

There’s a strange scene in the latter half of the film, where the girls are visited by an unidentified religious official. He leads them in prayer and then begins a discussion about “human rights.” We don’t see the whole discussion, but the girls ask him very politely – considering the circumstances – why it is that women have so few rights in Iran. He seems to respond by saying that we can’t do whatever we want in life and need to do what society expects of us. But the record scratch moment for me is when one of the girls, who’s been sentenced to death for killing her abusive father, asks why, if a child kills her father, the child is sentenced to death but, if a father kills his children, it isn’t even a crime.

Starless Dreams doesn’t explain or debate Sharia – or any part of Iran’s judicial system – directly. The problems faced by the girls Oskouei profiles seem – and on some levels, are – universal, but, for a foreign audience, there are occasional reminders that these universal experiences take place in a different social and political context. According to Amnesty International, Iran’s criminal justice system is a terrifying web of torture, mutilation, and execution – sometimes of minors – and women and minorities have few protections under law. Oskouei asked the government to let him make this documentary for seven years, and his stated aim is not to overthrow the judicial system, but to generate a greater feeling of compassion for the girls inside of it. This is how you couch an argument about the prison system in Iran.

One of the truths I’ve learned over the years is that you can’t change someone’s culture from the outside. You can’t do it without speaking the language – not just the literal, actual language of words and sentences and conjugations, but the tacit language; the language where you know how to talk about things within a certain political context. Mehrdad Oskouei speaks Persian better than I do, but I trust that he speaks Iran better than I do, too. Starless Dreams is a much more gentle, and gently melancholy film than I’d expect to see in this context, but maybe it’s the film we need. Maybe it’s one that will actually change the way Iranians see women and girls.

Starless Dreams is screening internationally as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. If you miss the festival, this is a documentary to keep on your list in the upcoming months. It’s isn’t an easy thing to sit with, but it provides a rich entry point into some very complex questions about the state of human rights in Iran and the state of correctional systems internationally.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

Seed & Spark: The Feminist Act of Telling a Man’s Story

‘The wHOLE’ explores humanity, exposes the prison industrial complex which controls and subverts the humanity of all those it houses, and in the course of the series it invites viewers to grow in empathy for a person, who, for some, would be otherwise unlikely to evoke it.

This is a guest post by Jennifer Fischer.

As a female filmmaker, I’ve asked myself many times why my latest dramatic project, The wHOLE, focuses on a man in an almost exclusively male milieu. In the pilot episode, no women appear on screen until the very end of the episode, and then only for a few minutes.

Given the show’s subjects–torture, racism, mass incarceration–to begin the series with a woman in solitary confinement would have been equally powerful, and equally realistic.

A part of me longed to begin the series there. Perhaps a woman was sent to an isolation unit because reported she had been raped by a correctional officer (as is quite common), or perhaps a transgender woman was sent to isolation “for her own protection,” only to find that isolation offers no protection, but only psychological, emotional, mental, even physical trauma.

We could have started the series in these places and more, but we didn’t. We started with Marcus, an African-American male.

We start the show with an individual unlikely to receive sympathy from most viewers: we offer no immediate explanation for why he has been sent to solitary confinement, nor do we hint at why he is imprisoned in the first place.

This individual is defiant, he has rage. This is an individual that many might think deserves his punishment.

Though the story centers on a man, telling his story becomes a feminist act. A friend recently shared her definition of feminism with me: “The crux of feminism is about equality. Feminism cannot ever be separated from the multiple layers of our identity—race, class, culture, etc. Feminism is about exploring our underlying humanity and the forces which try to control or subvert us.” Drawing on this understanding she went on to say, after watching our pilot episode, “Your story is a feminist story.”

Yes, I realize, it is. The wHOLE explores humanity, exposes the prison industrial complex which controls and subverts the humanity of all those it houses, and in the course of the series it invites viewers to grow in empathy for a person, who, for some, would be otherwise unlikely to evoke it.

As I developed this project, I did a lot of research—speaking, meeting, and working alongside individuals who have themselves lived the experiences we’re highlighting. Cast and crew on the project have spent a combined seven years in solitary confinement.

And lately, I’ve been reading and listening to Angela Davis, a feminist and prison abolitionist icon, who spoke the now familiar phrase, “The personal is political.” She references Beth Richie, who discusses the ways that current incarceration practices reinforce “the intimate violence of the family, of the relationship… [t]he individual violence of battery and sexual assault.” The current system fails to offer restorative justice or solutions that benefit our society. It offers no solutions worthy of a feminist paradigm.

Solitary confinement is perhaps the most violent, most dehumanizing aspect of the prison industrial complex. When a person is placed in a small box for 23 hours a day with no human contact, it strips identity from them. It calls their existence into question. It is domination and subjugation at the most intense level. It is everything that feminists struggle against.

Bringing this hidden reality (facing approximately 80,000 men, women, and children in the U.S.) to light in a very authentic and real way is an act of feminism, an act of defiance, and an act of hope. Feminism is uplifting not only to women. Insisting on the humanity of all is a feminist act.

Angela Davis says, “Prisons are constituted as Normal. It takes a lot of work to persuade people to think beyond the bars, and to be able to imagine a world without prisons and to struggle for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment.”

She’s right. We’ve come to see prisons as a way of life. Some viewers of the series may think the system is working because they are not affected by the problem. And if it doesn’t affect them, they need not act. But the truth is this series is about the whole of our society—our acceptance of a violent, oppressive system that only echoes the worst of our history (colonialism, slavery, patriarchy).

Davis does insist that a feminist approach to understanding prisons must focus on imprisoned women as well, not exclusively on men. As it traces its narrative arc, The wHOLE will do that as well—it’s one of the main reasons The wHOLE is a series, rather than a film. We will tell many more stories from behind bars as the series unfolds and through transmedia storytelling during the initial season.

We’ll tell stories of women who are imprisoned, of children who are imprisoned, of exonerees, of the families left behind, of the correctional officers, nurses, psychologists, and others asked to enforce this isolation. And each of these stories will be told through a feminist lens because ultimately, The wHOLE, is about the humanity of us all. Its insistence on humanity, on equality, and on the dignity of all lives is what makes it a feminist story.

This is why I am proud to be a woman telling a man’s story. And it seems only fair, given how often men have taken it upon themselves to tell women’s stories. I’m proud, too, to be collaborating with men who share my vision, who understand this project as an act of resistance and defiance. I’m proud of our feminist lens.

Become a part of The wHOLE by either watching the pilot and/or supporting the series, and by inviting others to become a part of The wHOLE as well.

Producer Jennifer Fischer co-founded Think Ten Media Group with Ramon Hamilton. Prior to producing The wHOLE, Jennifer produced the company’s multi-award winning feature film, SMUGGLED, and served as the Producer of Marketing and Distribution for the film, successfully self-distributing the film, which screened at universities, colleges, and community organizations throughout the United States and abroad. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, where she fell in love with filmmaking and directed and produced her first short film, “Songs of Palestine.” She followed that with a narrative award-winning short film, “Rachel’s Fortune,” which she wrote, edited, scored. She served as a technical consultant on “In Conflict With Kismet,” a short film from Writer/Director Dani Dixon, which debuted on BET and was featured at the Reel Women International Film Festival.

Jennifer can be found on Twitter @IndieJenFischer, and she curates a Film Articles and Resources Pinboard that Indiewire selected as one of the Top 10 Pinboards for Independent Filmmakers to Follow. She also recently started a Women In Film Pinboard as well. Tweet your best Women In Film stuff at her so that she can pin it!

Ava DuVernay’s ‘Middle of Nowhere’ a Complicated, Transformational, and Feminist Love Story

Written by Megan Kearns.

I often talk about how I want to see more female-fronted films, created by female filmmakers, including women of color on-screen and behind the camera. I want complex, strong, intelligent, resilient, vulnerable, flawed women characters. I want more realistic depictions of love: tender, supportive yet complicated. I want my films to make a social statement if possible. In Ava Duvernay’s award-winning, poignant and evocative film Middle of Nowhere, she masterfully displays all of the above.

Middle of Nowhere is such a brilliant film – quiet yet intense – I worry my words won’t do it justice.

When we meet the intelligent, persistent and amiable Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi in a captivatingly powerful performance), she’s living for her husband Derek (Omari Hardwick). She has put her life, her career, her education, her dreams on hold. All so she can emotionally and financially support Derek. Ruby quits medical school after her husband Derek faces an 8-year prison sentence. She wants to visit her husband in prison on weekends and doesn’t want to miss his weekday calls. Ruby envisions them as a team, a united front. But Derek wants her to let go and move on with her life.

These two exchanges in the beginning of the film punctuate the disparity in Ruby and Derek’s views:

Derek: “You were on your way to doing something. Don’t stop.”
Ruby: “We were on our way.”

Derek: “I want you to keep going with your life…Don’t stop for me.”
Ruby: “You are me.”

You want Ruby to succeed. You want her to find happiness. But she can’t move on. Derek isn’t the only one trapped. Ruby is imprisoned, haunted by the beautiful memories of the past, determined to survive the present, waiting it out for her happily reunited future.

Ruby must adapt to her new life. She bonds with another wife of an inmate on her weekly bus ride to the prison, the two support one another through their ordeal. Ruby tells her mother Ruth (Lorraine Toussaint) she’s taking night shifts at the hospital so she can support Derek as he’s going through a tough time. Her mother skeptically questions this as she knows her daughter struggles and sacrifices too. Frustrated and angry, she believes Ruby is throwing her life away for a man who doesn’t matter.

Ruth: “Oh he’s going through a tough time? I see. Then, by all means, sit home and wait to comfort him. That makes a lot of sense.”

It’s also “radical,” although it shouldn’t be, to see a loving black relationship on-screen. A beautiful yet heartbreaking love story, Ruby and Derek passionately love each other. We see Ruby and Derek cooking together, playful and tender, in Ruby’s memories. We witness her bittersweet words to Derek as she writes in an anniversary card, “Next year, I’ll whisper this in your ear. Happy anniversary. I love you.” Throughout the film, Ruby imagines Derek sleeping next to her, holding her. When Ruby visits Derek in prison, their love hangs in the air, unspoken yet palpable.

When we see a prison story, it follows the inmates, rarely their families. My mother worked at a prison, doing payroll for correctional officers. So I grew up hearing stories of inmates and COs. But what about their families? DuVernay was curious about all those women who visit their loved ones in prison. Where do they go? What are their stories? It’s a story seldom told. In an interview, DuVernay said:

“I’m from Los Angeles and I know countless women who live this kind of life every day, year after year. You see women struggling to keep it all together while a loved one is in jail. But we don’t hear about them or their struggles in a way that resonates with others. Their stories are so compelling. It’s as if they are in their own little world and no one else sees them.”

I had the pleasure of seeing Middle of Nowhere at the Athena Film Fest a few weeks ago. In her Q&A at the festival, Duvernay — the first African-American woman to win Best Director at Sundance — talked about the travesty of the prison system. How prisons charge an obscene amount of money for inmates to call their loved ones. How they place inmates in prisons far from their families. When asked in an interview if she’s a feminist filmmaker, DuVernay responded:

“I’m a black filmmaker. That covers all my politics.”

While DuVernay may not call herself a feminist or identify as one, this to me was an undoubtedly feminist film. Boasting a strong, intelligent female protagonist, the film raised intersectional issues of gender, race, class, incarceration, marriage, fidelity and motherhood.

We see everything from Ruby’s perspective, witnessing her journey. DuVernay isn’t afraid to allow silence in the film, to let Ruby’s emotions sink in. Middle of Nowhere is a “complicated love story” yet passes the Bechdel Test with ease. While Derek at times consumes her thoughts and words, Ruby converses with her sister Rosie and her mom Ruth about other topics besides men. Ruby and Rosie’s relationship nurtures yet challenges one another. The two sisters unite against their complicated relationship with their mother. Ruth tries to steer her grown children to not follow in her footsteps making the same mistakes she made. She wants her daughters to not be afraid to ask for help. She demands Ruby live her own life, wanting her to stop being afraid to speak up for herself.

With each character, you see their mistakes and flaws. You understand the circumstances that led them to make the choices they have made. Yet Middle of Nowhere villainizes no one. Derek, the easiest character to potentially demonize, retains his dignity and humanity.

We witness Ruby’s fierce passion when she confronts Derek’s lawyer and Derek’s friend Rashad. While she seems more comfortable to speak up on Derek’s behalf — although these encounters obviously impact her future too — Ruby eventually becomes more at ease articulating her needs.

Brian (David Oyelowo), the bus driver who unexpectedly enters her life, tells Ruby she expects a fairytale ending. But like reality, there is no magical fairytale ending. No one’s going to rescue Ruby. She must decide what’s right for herself.

After Ruby experiences a devastating betrayal by someone she loves, she realizes she must go after what she wants. She can’t keep living in the shadow of memories, hoping for a reality that may never materialize.

Ruby: “We are somewhere in between, in a middle place…The past has disappeared. And the future? It doesn’t exist, until we get there.”

When do you stay? When is it time to move on?

I loved Middle of Nowhere, one of my favorite films of 2012. The haunting story boasts complex, fully dimensional characters. Poetic yet realistic dialogue emanates, draped in vivid images and lush, stirring music. The bittersweet yet satisfying ending brought me to tears.

While a romance, it doesn’t fall into the stereotypical gender traps: a woman changing for a man, a woman trying to catch a man, a woman throwing her life away for a man. Putting the pieces of her shattered heart back together, Ruby emerges from a woman living for her husband to living for herself. Middle of Nowhere transcends the usual boundaries of a love story between a woman and a man to become a transformational story about loving yourself. And that’s incredibly rare and powerful.

Biopic and Documentary Week: American Violet

This piece on American Violet, by Amber Leab, originally appeared at Bitch Flicks on April 5, 2010.

American Violet (2008)

American Violet tells the true story of an African-American mother of four girls arrested and falsely accused of selling crack cocaine. Set in a fictional Texas town with the 2000 presidential election as a fitting backdrop of confusion and corruption, we see Dee Roberts fight–with the help of ACLU lawyers–to clear her name and the names of other innocent people arrested in a broad sweep that day.

Newcomer Nicole Beharie gives a powerful performance as Dee, and the supporting cast, including Alfre Woodard as Dee’s mother, and Tim Blake Nelson and Malcolm Barrett as lawyers for the ACLU, do an equally good job.

It’s impossible to not love Dee–a beautiful woman, a kind and patient mother, a hard worker, and a caring friend. Her temper gets the best of her once in the film, but she’s protecting her children from their alcoholic father and his accused child molester girlfriend, and can hardly be faulted for it. I’m inclined to think the movie tries too hard to make her character likable. In contrast, Dee’s friend and neighbor Gladys–who is not a conventionally attractive woman, and does not have four adorable children trailing her–is a compelling and empathetic character, but the film completely drops the ball, even failing to credit the actor who plays her. Gladys is Dee’s inspiration for continuing to fight the DA even after her charges are dropped (because Gladys took a plea deal, while Dee would not), but we don’t get to explore Gladys or her situation. I’m curious as to why she’s part of the story, but not really allowed to be a character in the film. While the movie is about Dee, I would’ve liked to get to know Gladys a bit.

Click here to read the full piece on American Violet.

Movie Review: American Violet

American Violet is a small victory of a movie.

American Violet tells the true story of an African American mother of four girls arrested and falsely accused of selling crack cocaine. Set in a fictional Texas town with the 2000 presidential election as a fitting backdrop of confusion and corruption, we see Dee Roberts fight–with the help of ACLU lawyers–to clear her name and the names of other innocent people arrested in a broad sweep that day.

The film treats Dee with respect. We learn that her four children have three different fathers, but her private life is mostly kept private. When the DA questions Dee about “how many men she’s had sex with by the age of 24,” her lawyers quickly step in to remind them–and us–that a woman’s character is not to be judged by her sexual history. This was a refreshing moment in the film, when even in so-called women’s films, slut-shaming is regular and almost perfunctory. In another moment of the film, we see testimony from the DA’s ex-wife and daughter, and it’s the daughter’s mocking of her own father’s (racist) slut-shaming that ultimately brings him down. (An ironic and uncomfortable twist is that while Dee’s private life is off limits, the DA’s private life is the strongest testimony against him.)

American Violet is the kind of movie I don’t like to criticize, because it’s a movie interested in Doing Good. It’s a sincere film, it addresses real-life social problems, it has a heroine we root for and get to see achieve a victory, despite the odds. And, it’s enjoyable to watch. Doing Good movies rarely achieve blockbuster status; they typically don’t have large budgets, stars, or major marketing campaigns. Doing Good movies are the kinds of movies we wish the public, at large, would see. However, films that expose social ills tend to suffer from cliched characters, predictable narratives, and overly simplified stories. American Violet–despite its powerful performances—doesn’t escape these problems.

There are a couple of troubling things about the film. First, its creators have a background in documentary filmmaking, and their dramatic attempts were stilted (I’ll expound upon this point in the following paragraphs). Second, while I appreciate the surprise change of direction in the film–criminal charges against Dee are dropped, and the dramatic focus becomes her lawsuit against the racist DA–attacking a single DA for racism leaves the system intact. Yes, I realize this was a true story, but the filmmakers’ choice to dramatize this specific case–reportedly after they heard the story on NPR–feels a bit suspect to me. Texas law was changed as a result of Dee’s case (previously, a tip from a single informant was enough for an arrest), but the system itself seemed enforced; the “one bad apple”–the racist DA–abused the law, and was reprimanded. However, the DA remained in his position and was re-elected by voters who, in this district, weren’t particularly bothered by his racially-motivated policies. There was a real sense of ambivalence in Dee’s victory–a monetary settlement for her and the others wrongly accused, and a personal victory, but barely a scratch on the system. Perhaps the film’s inability to create great drama reflects our society’s inability to really change the system. We want the system to change. But the best we can get–in film or life–are small (yet not insignificant) steps in the right direction.

In light of the Senate’s recently passed legislation to reduce, not rectify, the mandatory minimum sentencing discrepancy for crack cocaine possession, we see a drug policy that is racist to the core. In the United States, possession of five grams of crack cocaine carries a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years, while it takes 100 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. According to the NAACP,

Everyone seems to agree that crack cocaine use is higher among Caucasians than any other group: most authorities estimate that more than 66% of those who use crack cocaine are white. Yet in 2006, 82% of those convicted and sentenced under federal crack cocaine laws were African American. When you add in Hispanics, the percentage climbs to above 96%. Since enactment of this law, the 100 to 1 ratio has had a devastating and disproportionate impact on the African American and Hispanic communities.

The mandatory minimum sentencing law was enacted in 1986 under false beliefs about crack cocaine, and its results have been devastating. Instead of equalizing the penalty, however, the Senate agreed to make it less worse: reduce the discrepancy from 100:1 to 18:1.

The facts about US sentencing laws are a bit beside the point in relation to American Violet; in the case of the film, the women we focus on are innocent. Police found no drugs or evidence of drug possession, distribution, or use. The filmmakers’ true interests here were legal in nature, though, and the characters in the film felt, at times, like tools for exploring the law. The specific laws on trial in the film are the now-defunct Texas single-informant law, the Clinton-era financial incentive to law enforcement agencies based on the number of drug convictions per county, and the rules surrounding and use of the plea bargain. While in jail, Dee learns that she can take a plea bargain to have her sentence suspended and return home to her children, or she can fight the allegations with her court-appointed attorney–who essentially tells her she’d be crazy not to take the plea. Before seeing this film, I never really thought about plea bargains–who cuts these deals and who ultimately benefits from them. In films we typically see the plea bargain used by people guilty of a crime to bring down the more-guilty parties involved. The issue felt like a minor point in the film, but in the end we see how invested in exposing the corrupt nature of the plea bargain the film really is. Ninety percent of the US prison population accepted a plea bargain, 95% never saw a jury, and the US has the world’s largest prison population. It’s a shame that the most shocking and dramatic moment of the film appeared in the end screen of statistics.

In this case, neither the DA nor the tactics really were impacted; what we get is Dee’s personal victory, which is still powerful and important. Not only was her arrest record expunged, but the other innocent people who were arrested with her also had their records expunged–meaning they could remain in their homes, apply for a job without fear of a background check, and not have to live with a false arrest haunting them.

Ultimately, I liked this film, and encourage others to see it. I do feel ambivalence about it, and am a little disappointed in some of the choices made, but do think it’s a strong, woman-centered film.

Watch a preview of American Violet and learn more about the film here. Leave your thoughts about the film–and any links to reviews or discussions you’ve read–in the comments.