Girls in prison, Iranian-style, in Mehrdad Oskouei's surprising STARLESS DREAMS

It begins with the usual, as the perp is fingerprinted and then those "felon" photos are quickly taken, as we follow that prisoner through the process. Except that here, the felon is a girl in her late-teen years, and the location is Iran. Uh-oh. But wait. After viewing STARLESS DREAMS, the new documentary from Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei, rather than experiencing the usual "isn't-prison-awful!" sense you get from so many incarceration movies, you are more likely to feel that this may be the safest, kindest place for these girls in all of Iran.

Mr. Oskouei, shown at right, was evidently given extraordinary access to the prison and its inmates, and he was also able to gain the trust of both the girls and their guards in a rather extraordinary way. Consequently, his documentary is full of what certainly seems like "real life," as the girls chatter and laugh and play games and enjoy what seems -- against their experience in the outside world, either at home with their families or as runaways -- a comparatively idyllic existence.

We meet this gaggle of girls piecemeal and learn only haltingly about each one and her previous-to-prison life. It is not even clear exactly why some of these girls are here -- perhaps for simply running away or being on the outs with their blood family. In other cases we do learn why (patricide is one reason), and yet the details for even this render the murderer at the very least a kind of self-defense victim.

The documentary is often gorgeously filmed: sharp, clear, colorful and with an eye for both detail and beauty (where the latter can be found, at least). Oskouei also offers some lovely compositions and framing.

What makes the film so special, however, is the friendship the girls clearly feel for each other (they share such similar dreadful family backgrounds) and the liveliness and high spirits they so often exhibit.  Which point up even more strongly that the place of Iranian women, in both society and the family, is simply awful.

"Why are you crying, 651?" asks the filmmaker at one point. "Because her story is the same as my story," the girl answers, adding that she is called 651 because, "that is the number of grams they found on me." "How will your family welcome you home? another girl is asked. "With chains and a beating," she answers.

Many of the girls (perhaps most) want to stay in prison. Once you've heard their "family" stories, you'll understand why. They put on a sort of puppet show (below) during which they can hide behind those puppets/masks and say what they think. Yet, they do not seem at all shy about saying this even to a cleric who comes to visit, to whom they deliver some hard questions about god and justice. What we hear of his answers does not in the least suffice.

The movie cannot help but be ultra-feminist against the all-encompassing patriarchy that is Islam and Iran. As to her future, one young woman predicts that she will die in the gutter one day. "Don't you want to fight for a better life," the filmmaker asks? "Society is stronger than I am," she answers him.

One girl, at last reunited with her family (one of the few that seems even halfway bearable), tells us, "I'm just so happy: It feels strange." What happens to the couple of girls who actually go back to their families? We never learn the outcome of this or about what happens to any of the other girls. And the fact that the filmmaker was given such access to the prison does make me wonder if perhaps he was not expected to portray that prison in a good light.

Still, what he has given us in this portrait of Iran's younger generation of females is, while deeply disturbing, also something to cherish. From The Cinema Guild and running a brisk 76 minutes, the documentary opens this Friday, January 20, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. On Jan. 26 & 28: it will play the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; on February 10 it opens at the University of Wisconsin Cinematheque in Madison, and on April 14 at the Colorado State University/ACT Human Rights Film Festival in Fort Collins, Colorado. 

China laid bare (once again) in Johnny Ma's stinging do-the-right-thing movie, OLD STONE

Making the correct choice -- as best you can determine, at least -- is given quite the workout in a new Chinese-Canadian movie that starts off like a heavy-duty social-justice melodrama before turning into a very weird kind of revenge (against society) quasi-thriller. That OLD STONE, written and directed by first-timer Johnny Ma (shown below), works as well as it does is due in large part to the quietly riveting performance from its lead actor, Chen Gang (shown on poster, left, and further below), who brings such self-effacing honesty and troubling kindness to his role of protagonist, that he will keep you hooked through some very odd twists and turns, a little sentimentality and a full-out character descent into... well, you'll see.

Mr. Ma, born in China but raised from age ten in Canada, offers up past, present, and even a little future in his film, which tells its story of enormous social injustice via his leading character: a not especially smart but essentially decent and honorable taxi driver involved in a traffic accident that sends a young motorcyclist to the hospital and our protagonist into the hell-on-earth that is apparently Chinese society today. Those, like myself, unfamiliar with the ins and out of China's health care, policing and insurance systems, will have to take what Ma dishes out as gospel. Given what we, along with our hero, experience here, this is not difficult to do.

Initially, you may imagine that the movie is something akin to the recent Mexican melodrama that indicted that country's horrid health-care/insurance system, A Monster With A Thousand Heads. But, no: it lacks that film's momentum, swift pacing and single-mindedness. Instead Ma goes a bit too heavily for "art," opening with and returning time and again to a view of a forest and its rolling trees.

We learn of the accident (above), along with what led up to this, in small doses, spending time with our taxi driver, his family, his boss, the police, and the hospital, not to mention the comatose victim and his family (the latter via cell phone), and the drunk skunk who actually caused the accident. All of this is woven pretty well into the unfurling scenario, with most of the puzzle pieces fitting together by the time we reach the finale.

Most effective as an indictment of a society that seems every bit as venal, uncaring and incompetent as our hero is caring and kind, the movie actually misses its mark as strong drama mostly by trying a little too hard for the artsy and/or noirish.

But Old Stone is worth seeing as a first step in what might be a productive career for the filmmaker, and especially for the award-calibre performance from the terrific Mr. Chen.

From Zeitgeist Films, in Mandarin with English subtitles, and running a short 81 minutes, the movie opens in New York (at the IFC Center) tomorrow, Wednesday, November 30; in Seattle (at the Grand Illusion Cinema) on December 2; and Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Ahrya Fine Arts) on December 9. For a look at all the dozen currently-scheduled playdates -- with theaters and cities included -- simply click  here  and then scroll down.

Davis/Heilbroner's STONEWALL UPRISING tracks a seminal event in gay history

The Stonewall story stands tall in gay history (American gay history, at least). At times it almost seems like our own Nativity tale, or maybe a combination of our Crucifixion/
Resurrection. And that's just for Christian mythology addicts. What Muslim gays might make of it, I have no idea. And Jewish gays? Well, it certainly ain't Masada. In STONEWALL UPRISING, the somewhat circuitous new documentary by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, this event gets the best presentation of how and why Stonewall happened that TrustMovies has yet seen.

Based on David Carter's book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, the film merges talking-head interviews with archival footage, news clips with what I believe may be re-enactments, and even adds a helpful graphic depiction of how a horde of community protesters were able to outmaneuver the police on that fateful night.  If you've ever wanted to know more about Stonewall, here's your guide.  (The filmmakers tell us in a preface note that very few photographs were taken during this fateful night, hence their use of just about everything else to bring their story together visually.)

Other documentaries over the years have covered this event, but not, I think, in the depth or detail we see here.  And if other portions of the documentary are a bit flabby, this singular achievement makes up for that.  Some of the interviews here are quite good, but others seem repetitive, particularly after other documentaries -- Before Stonewall, for instance -- that we've previously seen.   There is also a circularity to the construction (making it occasionally seem as if we've been there/done that) plus a rather odd timeline (in its history of gays in America, the film does not introduce The Mattachine Society until halfway through.)

But if the overall impression sometimes runs to the "gray and same," the individual details are often quite something. The masquerading law that made it a crime to "dress up" (see photo at right), a pharmaco-
logical example of "waterboarding" used on gays during their enforced hospital stays of the 1950s, and the fact that, back in those days, there was no "coming out" because, as one interviewee tells us, literally everyone was "in" that very large closet.  Back then, at best homosex-
uality was a sickness, at worst a crime.  And just why were those police radios cut off on the night of the raid? (The film's real coup is getting the NY cop who led the actual raid to talk about it now).

Davis (shown above, right) and Heilbroner (above left), who last year gave us Waiting for Armageddon, do a good job of showing us how the patrons of the Stonewall Inn -- a gay bar owned by the Mafia who evidently paid off the police to allow it to remain open (the Mafia appears to be the only organization back then with the balls, savvy and Capitalistic entrepreneurship to know how to fully take advantage of a downtrodden minority) -- instead of peacefully submitting to arrest and detainment, rose up on the night of June 28, 1969, when the police instituted yet another raid on the bar.  Suddenly, an anger that would pre-date Network's "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore" took hold, and once word of the standoff against the police reached the surrounding neighbor-
hood, hundreds of people appeared to join in the fray, making history -- as well as a lot of noise and partying -- in the process.

What the documentary duo make clear in their film is how the community, as much as the bar patrons, helped this sudden, small event turn into the beginning of a monumental change in attitude -- of gays themselves, and of American toward them.  (Not that there isn't still a long way to go.) It also insists on the use of the term "uprising," rather than "riot," to describe what happened that night.  The filmmakers' point -- a good one, I believe -- is that Stonewall was more about the striving for social justice and equality than for anything else.

After playing at a couple of recent festivals, Stonewall Uprising, from First Run Features, makes its theatrical debut Wednesday, June 16, at Film Forum in New York City, after which it will wend its way nationwide.  To see the currently scheduled dates, cities and theaters, simply click here.  The filmmakers themselves, along with author David Carter, NYC's own Christine Quinn, and some of the subjects from the film will all appear in person at Film Forum at various times during the run.  To learn who and when, click here and scroll down.