Sundance Film Festival 2023: Joonam (US Documentary Competition) Review
Joonam is a bold and tender project capturing a tortuous quest for identity, which falls short in fulfilling its promise and ends up a film about being an outsider. Sierra Urich’s feature had its World Premiere in the U.S. Documentary Competition Section at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Joonam, a first-person work that Sierra Urich directed, shot, and edited, depicts a personal search for identity. The filmmaker aims to document what she anticipates to be a personal transformation as she attempts to reconnect with her Iranian heritage by focusing on her Iranian mother and grandmother. Quickly, one gets to meet three characters: US-born Sierra Urich, her Iranian grandmother with limited English abilities, and her Iranian-born mother who emigrated to the US after the Shah was overthrown. As she is portrayed in the movie, filmmaker Sierra Urich is a modest and reserved young woman who wants to learn Farsi so that she can communicate with her grandmother in that language, without needing her mother as translator.
The film’s delicate narration is what I find most striking. Small, delicate nuances reveal that the director is interested in understanding more about her past, which requires her learning Farsi. In a banal scene, Sierra Urich opens Google Maps on her laptop, zooms in on Iran, and tries to drop the yellow Google Maps man somewhere in Iran to get a sense of the surroundings, to no avail. This simple scene has a significant meaning. She is eager to discover the country but it remains mysterious to her. Her past is hard to grasp, and her means are limited. The deftness of the narration is undeniably one of the film’s assets.
Anchored by the nicest and most tender music score I have heard in a while, the film slowly portrays, by touches, the three characters of the film, whose temper and behavior are best illustrated by a specific sequence, which also epitomizes the director’s struggle to get closer to her mother and grandmother. In her garden, Sierra is having a hard time setting up her camera and sound while attempting to film her mother and grandmother who are visibly losing patience. The mother and grandmother start complaining in Farsi so Sierra does not understand them (which yields one of many funny scenes of the film). This demonstrates how challenging it is for her to effectively reach and capture her mother and grandmother. The language barrier serves as more evidence that Sierra does not belong to the same circle as her mother and grandmother. Her family is out of reach.
Just like in the previous example, the director seems to have a goal, and takes a step back to film her quest. But basically, not much happens. Throughout the movie, the mother and grandmother are frequently invited by the filmmaker to elaborate on their eventful lives and complex past, as Iran-born women who were forced, or intended to flee the country after the Shah stepped down. These scenes feel a bit forced sometimes, and the filmmaker does not seem to collect more than just conventional elements.
It turns out Joonam is a disturbing feature. On the one hand, it is a profoundly delicate and tender film, centering on the filmmaker’s quest for identity. On the other hand, it lacks substance and remains at a distance from its subjects.
Moreover the director’s mindset and motivations also take a very long time to reveal themselves. Despite being a first-person narrative, it appears that the person holding the camera is too reluctant to express her thoughts. Therefore, the film quickly becomes frustrating, by not delving enough into the director’s mindset, nor the mother and grandmother’s stories, apart from conventional elements. The director mainly relies on her funny grandmother to create pleasant scenes and keep the movie running. Yet, the frustration keeps growing. We can feel the sometimes artificial mise en scene, we feel that the director is waiting for something to happen, for the scenes she sets up to give birth to something. To no avail. Her presence is always felt, in every scene. But she does not seem to engage with the scene. We don’t even know if she is trying to glean answers for her or just for the film. I wished for more direct cinema, for us to get a better sense of how anxious and frustrated she is about not knowing anything about Iran. The filmmaker does not engage enough with her subject, she remains neutral and the result looks superficial.
The use of archival footage without comments is interesting insofar as it slowly gives bits of information about the characters’ past, but it lacks substance for the viewers to really and deeply engage with the characters. The problem is the asymmetry between that past that is partially remembered and the random, non suggestive visuals of daily life scenes (gardening, driving, going to the hairdresser…). To the point that it becomes more a film about members of the Iranian diaspora living comfortably in the U.S., than a personal quest to get closer to her origins.
It is not until the film’s finale that the filmmaker finally enters the screen and reveal her mindset. In this segment, the film gets interesting: Sierra Urich finally voices her frustration of being unable to truly access her mother and grandmother’s native culture, because of her mom trying to protect her from the dangers of current Iran. At this point, I thought I could read the film differently. In the light of this reveal, the entire film in which I, as a viewer, felt frustrated of being left at a distance from the characters’ stories, I realized the film is actually a mirror of the director’s feeling. But why not being more radical if this was ultimately the point? If it is a first-person film, why did the director not let us experience the language barrier by not subtitling some parts for instance, to make us feel this weirdness. Did I need over 90 minutes of film unable to dig down below the surface before getting the filmmaker’s perspective? I doubt it though.
I also regret that the film tries to get a greater echo by appropriating itself the images of the ongoing uprise happening in Iran. The film tries to surround the story of director Sierra Urich with this rebellious climate by squeezing in some TikTok videos of young Iranians trying to breathe freely and other snaps of street rebellion and demonstrations, but she has no connection to it and makes no comment about it, making this move rather inappropriate.
Overall, Joonam is deceptive. This delicate personal tale of seeking one’s identity turns out as a somewhat clumsy film about just being an outsider.
Acknowledgements: Kirsten Nolan & Caroline Salvaggio (Falco Ink).
