Sonita

Sonita, an Afghan refugee living in Tehran, is fifteen and wants to be a rapper. As she puts it, it would be easier if Michael Jackson and Rihanna were her parents. The songs she writes are about Afghan women and about child brides. Then she learns that her family is planning to sell her to a man she has never met. At that point Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami's documentary breaks its own neutrality: the director pays Sonita's mother to have the marriage postponed, and she does not hide it in the film. It is a decision argued over in documentary ethics, and the film takes that argument into itself. It won both the grand jury prize and the audience award in the world documentary section at Sundance in 2016. Sonita's own voice is at the centre of it.