FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 30, 2020

Cinema Guild acquires Mehrdad Oskouei’s IDFA Award Winner Sunless Shadows

NEW YORK, NY-Cinema Guild announced today the acquisition of all U.S. distribution rights for Mehrdad Oskouei’s Sunless Shadows. The film made its world premiere as the opening night film at IDFA and also won the festival’s Best Directing prize. It will make its U.S. Premiere on Feb. 6 in New York as part of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. Cinema Guild will release the film in 2020.

The follow-up to Oskouei's critically acclaimed Starless Dreams (2016), Sunless Shadows takes another look at the lives of teenage girls in an Iranian juvenile detention center. But this time the focus is narrowed: each of the film’s principal subjects is serving time for the murder of a male family member. One by one, Oskouei invites them to go into a room alone, push the red button on the camera and address their accomplices or their victims.

With this new confessional approach combined with the ever-deepening relationships he has with his subjects, Oskouei presents a picture of the disenfranchised in this aggressively male-dominated society and of the prison that is their shelter from it.

"Since Starless Dreams, Mehrdad’s rapport with his subjects has deepened and his approach has only gotten sharper," said Cinema Guild President Peter Kelly. "The result is a film that is both warm and haunting, both a picture of a society self-destructing and a community surviving against all odds."

The deal was negotiated by Peter Kelly of Cinema Guild with Nasrine Médard de Chardon of Dreamlab Films.

Cinema Guild is a premier distributor of world cinema, independent films and documentaries, whose upcoming releases include Angela Schanelec's I Was at Home, But..., Albert Serra’s Liberté and Kazik Radwanski's Anne at 13,000 ft. Recent theatrical releases include Wang Xiaoshuai’s Chinese Portrait, Lindsey Cordero and Armando Croda’s I’m Leaving Now and RaMell Ross’s Academy Award-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening.

For press inquiries, please contact Cinema Guild at: (212) 685-6242 or press at cinemaguild dot com.

For press inquiries, please contact us at:

(212) 685-6242 or press at cinemaguild dot com

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