Released in fall 2024, The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life is a 55-minute documentary produced and directed by Persis Karim and Soumyaa K. Behrnes. Karim is an Iranian American writer, poet, and professor at San Francisco State University, where she has been the director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. An award-winning filmmaker, Behrnes has directed three other films and teaches documentary filmmaking at San Francisco State University. Deftly directed, edited, and set to musical score by a team of scholars and professionals, The Dawn is Too Far opens a fascinating vista to the world of the Iranian diaspora, being at once poetic, historically informed, and culturally sensitive. The film’s title is a verse of classical Persian poetry that alludes to Yalda, the winter solstice, when Iranians anticipate the longer and brighter days to come, heralded by Nowruz, the spring equinox and beginning of the new year.
The film opens with a panoramic view of the San Francisco Bay Area and descends on the home of Parviz Shokat, the oldest of the eight friends whose stories are the film’s subject. We see Shokat rummaging through old photos and memorabilia, telling us what it was like to arrive in Northern California as a teenager in 1958. We cut to footage from a 1961 Nowruz celebration by Iranian students at a park in Berkeley, sharing food, playing music, and dancing. The film proceeds to tell the stories of its protagonists, women and men who arrived in Northern California at different times and under different circumstances from the 1970s through the 2010s. These intimately personal stories are contextualized with raw footage and newsreels covering the historical events causing and defining the trajectory of the Iranian diaspora in the U.S., such as 1960s-1970s student activism against the Shah’s regime, the Iranian Revolution, the 1979-1981 American Hostage Crisis, and periodic popular uprisings against the Islamic Republic. These events and their tumultuous and repressive aftermath, in Iran and the U.S., shaped the lives of tens of thousands of Iranian refugees and exiles, including the film’s subjects.
The film’s central focus on the Bay Area depicts how the Iranian characters’ life stories are intertwined with Northern California’s history of counterculture, hippies and leftist political activism that dominated the 1960s to the 1980s. Shokat tells us about going to prison alongside anti-Vietnam War and Free Speech activists who occupied campuses and the Iranian consulate in San Francisco and about his association with members of the Black Panther Party. The film’s subjects are middle class, well-educated, artistically inclined, and intellectually resourceful, demonstrating their capacity to adapt to their home away from-home in the Bay Area.
Though we can see and feel the emotional toll they each have suffered when uprooted from their homeland, we get to know resilient survivors who have adjusted to diasporic life by staying politically engaged, making art and music, staging plays, and preparing fine Iranian cuisine. Perhaps most important is the sense of community they share. We are taken to intimate gatherings like Yalda. Here, the circle of friends, including Karim, sing songs, recite poetry, and enjoy delicious food, melancholically acknowledging the far distance from dawn without despairing in the long night. Throughout the film, this powerful mood is accompanied by a hauntingly beautiful musical score that blends perfectly with the narrative and imagery.
Artistically and intellectually sophisticated, The Dawn is Too Far contributes to our understanding of the Iranian diaspora without claiming to represent its full range or complexity. The focus on a small circle of Bay Area Iranians leaves out America’s largest Iranian community, which resides in Southern California as well as Silicon Valley’s Iranian corporate executives and tycoons. Still, the film counters confused media depictions of US-Iran relations and “salvation” narratives of assimilation. Instead, we witness the painful arc of history endured by the film’s subjects and their contributions to the Iranian diaspora and their new home. In the end, The Dawn is Too Far is a vivid, honest and compassionate portrayal of the Iranian diaspora, accessible to a general audience and valuable for educational purposes, especially in classrooms. It is a fitting companion to the best documentaries about America’s immigrant and diasporic communities, particularly those from Southwest Asia and North Africa.