Kim Longinotto in Person

Filming in a center for young female runaways in Tehran, Longinotto and anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini have created an intensely moving, insightful, and troubling portrait of several rebellious young women and the conditions under which they live. Beatings, verbal abuse, abandonment, public humiliation, and domestic incarceration are among the grievances the young women bring when they are asked to explain why they ran away from home. Brought to the center by the Police Unit for Combating Social Corruption, the girls stay there until they are either reunited with their families or given a job and place to live. While the girls' complaints about their home life are disturbing enough, the advice they get from their counselors (“You must put up with hardship”) and the decision of several of the girls to return to abusive homes make Runaway a profoundly disquieting experience.