Join us at Kucheh for a special screening of The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life, a poetic and deeply human portrait of Iranian Americans who have made the San Francisco Bay Area their home over the past five decades.
Filmmaker Persis Karim will be joining us.
We’re honored to welcome filmmaker Persis Karim for an in-person Q&A following the screening — an opportunity to hear directly about the making of the film and the stories it brings to light.
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The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life poetically narrates the story of a community of Iranian Americans who have made the San Francisco Bay Area their home over the past five decades. The film seeks to expand our understanding of Iranian immigration — what it means to leave home and country — and live through the episodes of turbulent histories of dissent, revolution, war, and separation — and reinvent oneself in a new place, country, and culture.
The Dawn is Too Far does not paint a story of salvation and happy assimilation, but rather seeks to identify the complex ways that members of the Bay Area's Iranian diaspora community have navigated the challenges and traumas of history—both Iranian and American — to reinvent themselves and tell their own stories; these as yet untold stories build on a longer history of Iranian immigration to Northern California, where Iranians as students, activists, artists, draw on as well as influence the larger culture of the Bay Area. This community and all that it has faced, offers a more nuanced story of the Iranian diaspora—the ways that this community enriches and enlivens the region where they live, work, and build families and community.
The Dawn is Too Far undermines the tired and overplayed news headlines that are dominated by narratives of enmity and mistrust between the government of Iran and the U.S., to offer a more humane understanding of how people's lives and the sacrifices they make are part of the larger story of immigration.
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Title: The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life
Release Date: Fall 2024
Country: USA
Age: 12A
Genre: Documentary
Feature Runtime: 55:21 minutes
Co-Directors: Persis Karim and Soumyaa K. Behrens
Co-Producers: Persis Karim and Soumyaa K. Behrens
Executive Producer: Persis Karim
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Persis Karim has endeavored for the last 28 years to create a more nuanced and full picture of Iran and its people in her work as a professor of literature first at San Jose State University, and more recently at San Francisco State University, where she taught Comparative and World Literature and served as director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies from 2017-2025. Her work as a literary scholar included editing three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature, and penning numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and culture for academic journals. She just one month ago, retired, and is looking forward to writing more poetry, as well as working on her family memoir about her parents' experiences living in occupied France and Iran during World War II and eventual immigration to the US. "The Dawn Is Too Far" is her first film and she very much hopes it offers a different and more thoughtful view of the Iranian immigrant experience than is often portrayed or rendered invisible in the media.