Documentary filmmaking has taken on a new life in recent years. Non-fiction storytelling can be as expansive or as intimate as any narrative feature.
With her first feature, Joonam, Sierra Urich turns the camera on herself and her family in an effort to learn more about her own history, and to attempt to fill a space that feels empty. Sparked by a phone call from her mother Mitra, Sierra sets out to spend time with her mother and grandmother Behjat, learning more about them and their family’s Persian heritage.
In the late 1970s, Mitra left Iran to pursue her studies in the United States. She fully expected to return home after graduation, but love and political strife had other plans. Just months after she arrived in Massachusetts, the Shah was overthrown and the Ayatollah Khomeini was installed in his place. Mitra stayed in the States, married, and started a family. Behjat stayed in Iran for 16 years awaiting the time she could finally join her daughter in the US.
Urich grew up in Vermont and has never set foot in Iran. She has a sense of longing and disconnection from the place that is so important to her personal history. That longing seeps into every frame of her documentary, a film that seems at first to be about her mother and grandmother, but is really more about her effort to learn about them in order to try to make sense of the way you can miss a place you’ve never been.
Blending several documentary styles together, Urich sometimes seems unsure which story to tell. She incorporates long stretches of static shots. Sometimes Mitra and Behjat tell stories. Other times Mitra and Sierra bicker in that charming way families do when they love each other but get easily annoyed. She incorporates old family films and photographs. Urich includes bits of TikTok videos from Iranian women protesting. When she connects with a Farsi teacher who travels to Iran, she intercuts her teacher’s cell phone video with her own facial reactions, looking on in wonder and wishing even more to travel to her ancestral land.
There is a sweet simplicity to Joonam (a Farsi term of endearment) that makes Urich relatable. You can’t help but hope she will one day be able to visit Iran. It’s easy to laugh when she can’t get her mother’s mic working and they start to argue. Mitra despairs that American children are disrespectful and entitled, and Behjat smiles sweetly and corrects her, “It’s all children.”
If there is a missed opportunity, it is in the focus on Urich’s relationship to her past, rather than the stories of her mother and grandmother. They tell stories. Anecdotes, memories, a few tears. But so much of their actual stories are left untold. Some of this comes from the waves of trauma and PTSD each suffered. Mitra remarks on it more than once as she excuses herself from speaking on certain topics, though she does reveal that two of her uncles were executed and her father spent time in prison. Why, when, or for how long, we never find out.
What we learn of Behjat is that she married at 14 and children soon followed. Her husband was a soldier, leaving her alone with the children for long stretches. She comments that she misses her home, but the way it was long ago. She would never go back now. Even the stories she tells are mostly the happy memories. The day she was “finally” allowed to marry her betrothed, and the joy she felt when she stepped into the airport on American soil, free and safe.
Throughout the film, Behjat speaks in small snatches of English, but mostly in Farsi. Mitra translates for Sierra whose language skills are still basic. There are times Behjat chatters when Mitra isn’t around and Sierra doesn’t know what she’s saying. Late in the film, she explains she sent the footage to be translated and was surprised by some of the transcripts she received. Without revealing what was in them, one scene near the end gives Urich new context to her own grandmother, and she realizes the footage can help her get to know Behjat in a way she hadn’t in nearly 30 years of life. It is a tender realization and adds a layer of sweetness to a documentary that is ultimately not about Behjat or Mitra or immigration or Iran. It is a story about three generations of women brought together by the very act of telling stories.
Joonam premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It is seeking distribution.
