Documentary: The Glass House

About this documentary

The fringes of Iranian society can be a lonely place, especially if you are a teenage girl with few resources to fall back on. The Glass House follows four girls striving to pull themselves out of the margins by attending a one-of-kind rehabilitation center in uptown Tehran. Forget about the Iran that you’ve seen before.

With a virtually invisible camera, the girls of The Glass House take us on a never-before-seen tour of the underclass of Iran with their brave and defiant stories: Samira struggles to overcome forced drug addiction; Mitra harnesses abandonment into her creative writing; Sussan teeters on a dangerous ledge after years of sexual abuse; and Nazila burgeons out of her hatred with her blazing rap music. This groundbreaking documentary reflects a side of Iran few have access to or paid attention to: a society lost to its traditions with nothing meaningful to replace them and a group of courageous women working to instill a sense of empowerment and hope into the minds and lives of otherwise discarded teenage girls.

The director’s statement

The idea for making The Glass House came organically when we were invited to the Omid e Mehr Center in Tehran during a short visit to Iran (for what should have been a couple of weeks and turned into two years). At first we weren’t interested in covering a women’s crisis center in Iran — it had been done a few times already. Our biggest hesitation was the difficulty in penetrating the thick façade of pretenses that dominate Iranian culture; intimacy with one’s subject is almost unattainable there. However after spending a couple of hours at Omid, surrounded by an incredible group of resilient teenage girls, we knew we would be fools not to accept the challenge, especially when the founder of the center, Marjaneh Halati, gave us unfettered access to the center and the girls.

Over the next 13 months, we were able to attain a very intimate relationship with the girls, spending eight hours a day at the center getting to know each one individually, working to gain their trust. Usually it was just me and my following the girls around, rarely asking questions, melting into the background, capturing whatever happened. I think it was the fact that we were a very small team — only Melissa, my producer/wife and me — that gave the girls a sense of ease. The intimacy experienced in the film came as a result of nothing less than time.

Once we had identified who our characters were, we focused on getting to know the girls and their lives. One could say that we let the girls lead us. It was not until we had shot more than 125 hours of footage that we sat down to think about the story, and it took us another year to flush out what that story would become. We knew we had a gem but wrestled with a big, unrefined rock for months before we saw results. Back in Iran we didn’t want to impose a “story” on the girls, and we would pay for that over the long winter and spring months it took to construct a cohesive narrative that takes the viewers into the gritty reality of urban Tehran.

About the film producers and their production company

Fictionville Studio, LLC (formerly Prometheus Cinema) is an independent production company established in 2007 by husband and wife team Melissa Hibbard and Hamid Rahmanian. Their goal is to produce engaging, socially responsible films that challenge their audiences’ perceptions about what they know and how they look at the world around them. Acknowledging that the medium of film is the most powerful tool available to motivate the world around us, they strive to create artistic works that inspire and inform.

Under Prometheus Cinema, they have produced the following: AN I WITHIN (1999) which received Kodak’s “Best Cinematography Award”, “Best American Short” from the LA International Short Film Festival and “Special Achievement Award” from the USA Film Festival. It was shown at various festivals.

BREAKING BREAD (2000), premiering on Los Angeles PBS station KCET, and SIR ALFRED OF CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT (2001), which was one of the sources for Steven Speilberg’s The Terminal, have been well received by the media and worldwide audiences.

SHAHRBANOO (2002) first premiered on New York PBS station WNET where it received the highest rating for an independently produced documentary of its kind. As a result, the film was picked up by stations all over the country and has shown as festivals and conferences around the world. Our first feature length fiction film,

DAY BREAK (2005) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and received a special prize at the Fajr Film Festival in Iran, the “Jury Award” at Annonay International Festival of First Films, “Best Actor” from Tereno International Film Festival in Italy, “Special Jury Award” from the Festival of African, Asian and Latin American Cinema of Milan, and “Best of the Middle East” from the Indianapolis International Film Festival. It has been used by US-based anti-capital punishment organizations to promote an end to capital punishment in the US.

Under the newly formed Fictionville Studio, they produced THE GLASS HOUSE (2008) which premiered at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Sundance Film Festival in the US under the World Cinema Documentary Competition category. It is co-produced by Impact Partners and the Sundance Channel.

Latest news:

Opening Night Film – Tri Continental Film Festival, South Africa, Sept 9-14

THE GLASS HOUSE wins the OSCE Human Right Award at Docufest, 2009

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