Soni­ta

This is a doc­u­men­tary in which its mak­ers are unwill­ing and unable to retain a respect­ful dis­tance from their sub­ject. Instead of using their cam­era to cre­ate a moral safe zone, where they are able to believe that their film­mak­ing is in itself an act of courage and defi­ance, they cross the line, real­is­ing that, maybe, actions speak loud­er than images.

It helps that Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s sub­ject is Soni­ta Alizadeh, a feisty teen who escaped from her par­ents in Afghanistan and fled to Iran after they threat­ened to sell her off for mar­riage. But her gru­elling plight awoke a dor­mant streak of activism, as Soni­ta start­ed writ­ing raps about the sor­ry sit­u­a­tion of young women in the region. Her lyrics artic­u­late wide­spread, pri­vate suf­fer­ing and the right­eous anger she chan­nels embod­ies the com­bat­ive, urgent nature of hip hop.

The film­mak­ers care­ful­ly fol­low her sto­ry through, and they’re very lucky that Soni­ta makes for such a charis­mat­ic and empa­thet­ic focal point. In chart­ing her attempts to dis­sem­i­nate her sor­rows through music, the film oper­ates as a crush­ing con­dem­na­tion of all soci­eties in which female expres­sion is sup­pressed in depress­ing­ly inno­v­a­tive ways. Even rop­ing in help from male music pro­duc­ers is a no-no, as it’s against the law in Iran for women to sing, and it’s the men who would be pun­ished for allow­ing it to happen.

Yet the film does also show the sim­ple ways in which these regres­sive laws can be swerved around, as Ghaem Magha­mi does every­thing in her pow­er to guide Soni­ta towards suc­cess, even it it means upping sticks and mov­ing to anoth­er coun­try. It may sound like a rel­a­tive­ly straight­for­ward tri­umph-over-adver­si­ty nar­ra­tive, but the film real­ly empha­sis­es the dif­fi­cul­ty of things that most view­ers would take for grant­ed. The dra­ma of return­ing home to her moth­er to get her pass­port becomes a mil­i­tary oper­a­tion, where pos­si­ble emo­tion­al bribes are set into place. It’s the pres­ence of the cam­era that spurs Soni­ta on, even to achieve some­thing as sim­ple as tak­ing off her head­scarf in private.