Event



As Far As They Can Run

With Tanaz Eshaghian
Feb 22, 2023 at - | Fisher-Bennett 401

As Far As They Can Run
Sponsored by
South Asia Center, Cinema Studies Department

Join us for a live showing of As Far As They Can Run, a documentary short-film short-listed for a 2023 Oscar nomination. Director Tanaz Eshaghian will be joining us for an in-person Q&A immediately after.

Film description:
 

In rural Pakistan, families with disabled children have very few options. Some desperate parents keep their children locked up in cages and sometimes they resort to keeping them on a chain to prevent them from wandering. When athletic coaches from Karachi persuade the parents of three disabled teenagers -- Ghulam, Sana, Sajawal – to allow their kids to participate in a sports training program as part of a Special Olympics initiative, the families have a glimpse of hope that living with disabilities doesn’t have to mean that their children are "useless." The parents and the coaches now must face the realities of what sports can—and cannot—change. Over a one-year period, Iranian-American filmmaker, Tanaz Eshaghian follows these three teenagers and their families as they grapple with shame and prejudice in rural Pakistan to realize new talents and a new sense of belonging through sports. 

Intimate and unflinching, hopeful and tragic, AS FAR AS THEY CAN RUN is a fascinating look at those who are struggling to find acceptance and worth in a society that has relegated them to the margins.

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Tanaz Eshaghian was born on September 8, 1974 in Iran and is an Iranian-American documentary filmmaker. She speaks English and Farsi. Eshaghian left Iran with her mother at the age of six. She grew up in New York City, went to Trinity School and graduated from Brown University in 1996 with a BA in Semiotics. Her first film “I Call Myself Persian,” completed in 2002, told the story of how Iranians living in the U.S. were affected by prejudice and xenophobia after the September 11 attacks. In Love Iranian-American Style, completed in 2006, she filmed her traditional Iranian family, both in New York and Los Angeles, California documenting their obsession with marrying her off and her own cultural ambivalence.

For her début feature-length film Be Like Others, a provocative look at men in Iran choosing to undergo sex change surgery, she returned to Iran for the first time in twenty-five years. Be Like Others, a BBC 2, France 5, ITVS production, premiered at the 2008 Sundance film festival and went on to win the Teddy special jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for and Emmy award. In 2011, she completed “Love Crimes of Kabul” a documentary film inside a women’s prison in Kabul Afghanistan focusing on “moral crimes” for HBO. In 2018, Tanaz directed The Last Refugees. In this film she follows the Kalajis family from Aleppo. They are among the last Syrian refugees allowed in the US before President Trump’s Muslim travel ban. The document shows how the Kalajis’ excitement and hope slowly turn into something else as the face they realities of surviving and the magnitude of what they are forced to leave behind. Her films have also screened at the Museum of Modern Art and in the Walter Reade cinema at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. She currently resides in New York City and is a mother of two daughters.

FILMS

  • 2002: I Call Myself Persian

  • 2003: From Babylon to Beverly Hills: The Exodus of Iran’s Jews

  • 2006: Love Iranian-American Style

  • 2008: Be Like Others

  • 2011: Love Crimes of Kabul (HBO)

  • 2018 The Last Refugees (Juno Films)

AWARDS

  • 2002: Best Short Documentary Film of Woodstock Festival, for I Call Myself Persian

  • 2008: Teddy Award, for Be Like Others

  • 2008: Amnesty International Film Prize, for Be Like Others

  • 2008: Reader Jury of the "Siegessäule" at 58th Berlin International Film Festival

    for Be Like Others