A Big Ear and Eye for Delinquent Girls: Interview with the Best Documentary Winner at the London Film Festival

"Dreams of Dawn" by Mehrdad Oskouei won the Best Documentary Film award at the 60th London Film Festival. This film, which also received the Amnesty International award at the Berlin Film Festival, follows the stories of delinquent girls under the age of eighteen in a juvenile correctional center. I sat down with Mehrdad Oskouei to discuss the details of this film. Can this film be considered a continuation of your previous two films, "Days Without Calendar" and "The Last Days of Winter"? In a way, perhaps a trilogy. Did you intend to create a trilogy from the beginning? That's a good question. When I was making the first film, obtaining permission was very difficult for me. After six months of effort, I was granted permission for ten days of filming. When I entered the juvenile correctional center and made "Days Without Calendar," I realized midway through filming that my stories were not finished with this film, and I decided to turn it into a trilogy. Initially, I did not know that there was a separate section for girls within the juvenile correctional center. I thought I would work on one or two sections about boys under fifteen and one or two other sections about boys between fifteen and eighteen. I thought I could make the second part sooner, but it took four years for me to get permission to make "The Last Days of Winter." Seven years before filming "Dreams of Dawn," I discovered that there was a section for girls there. One day, I saw two girls with ankle and wrist shackles and realized that there was a separate section there. Since then, I was eager to make the third part about girls as a conclusion to this trilogy. It took seven years to obtain permission. In the winter of 2013, I was granted permission, and it took two years to prepare the film. I participated in the Cinema Truth Festival and the Fajr Film Festival in Iran, and the world premiere of this film was at the Berlin Festival this year. How did the issue of adolescents and correctional centers become significant for you and attract your attention? The main issue in my films is social harms and pains, and those whose voices and images do not easily reach others. During a football match of the Iranian team, I thought about what feelings the children inside these centers had about it, and when I got permission and went inside, after Iran's first loss to Mexico, I realized that football was not a significant concern for these kids. That's how it started with football, but I actually entered their inner world, feelings, and emotions. That's how I got in, and more than ten years of my professional filmmaking life were spent there. The first question that probably comes to the mind of any Iranian audience is how you, as a man, were able to enter a girls' facility with its specific restrictions in Iran with your team? Obtaining permission from the prison organization in Iran is very difficult. I wanted to start my new work in a psychiatric hospital, but the public relations of the welfare organization told me that they did not know how the prison organization had granted me permission for my previous film, but do not think that we will grant permission so easily! Meanwhile, many psychologists, social workers, judges, and specialists have welcomed this trilogy. The officials of the juvenile correctional center loved the first and second parts I made and were very good advisors and companions. The prison organization felt that I was a concerned filmmaker about these kids and did not want to exploit my position as a filmmaker when they saw the previous two parts. When I made the films, the first people I showed them to were the officials of the center and the prison. I also initially showed all three of my films at festivals inside Iran, where they received attention, and then the opportunity for screening outside of Iran was provided. How did these girls agree to appear in front of your camera and speak, especially in these conditions in prison? Well, not prison, but the correctional center. These kids have not committed a "crime"; they have committed "delinquency" and are kept in correctional centers where they are educated for better conditions. I believe that in our society today, teenage girls are very smart, and if any change occurs for the better, they are the ones who will bring about these changes, and they know what they want and which direction to move. The girls who have committed delinquency for any reason and are in the center are very intelligent. I shared a lot about myself with them; who I am, what I do, what films I have made, why I am here, and why I want to make a film about them, and what this film is supposed to do. Many of them said that if making this film helps other girls avoid ending up here or helps families understand how hard it is for teenage girls to come here and be away from their families, feeling loneliness, sorrow, and pain, we will cooperate. My team also collaborated a lot. From the second or third day, all the girls started calling us "uncle"; Uncle Mehrdad, Uncle Mohammad, etc. We had become like a family with these kids. They saw us as fathers or brothers or uncles, and a reasonable and deep relationship formed. That year, I also had a daughter the same age as them, which brought me closer to them, and I felt like I was making a film about my daughters. An interesting point in the structure of the film is that you have completely focused on these girls. You have not been tempted to go after their families or even the officials of this center... My idea was to work in a small geography, meaning the geography of the girls' section of the correctional center. I tried to report and look at the inner world, feelings, emotions, thoughts, dreams, nightmares, hopes, joys, and everything that happens in the small world of these girls in that small geography. The expansion of my film is due to the vastness of their inner world. We mostly filmed inside a hall and its adjacent yard, and with my cinematographer, Mohammad Hadadi, we reached a visual structure, and we measured ourselves with that every day. We wanted the film to not be visually boring. If you pay attention, you will see that, for example, we follow them with the camera from behind their shoulders, which I think are very expressive shots. For editing, we spent three months just watching the rushes, and then it took nine months of editing, which was regularly corrected along the way. I wanted to focus on the kids. For example, you never see the bars; you only see them when the kids are released. These were things we had thought about beforehand, but in any case, the stories and events in front of the camera were not entirely under our control. We went along with the events. So nothing is reconstructed? I am very much against reconstruction in documentary films, especially of this kind. If there is a feeling of reconstruction somewhere, it is due to the editing style we have done. However, I feel that because of the lives these kids have lived and the depth of the hard experiences they have gained in life on the streets, no screenwriter can write with the power and emotional impact of their words and scenes. We tried to have big ears and eyes, and an open and receptive heart, and just follow them.