Sierra Urich has a documentary-ready household historical past, with modifications rippling by means of the generations. Her mom, Mitra, left Iran for faculty in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1979, simply months earlier than the Islamic revolution deposed the Shah and put the Ayatollah Khomeini in energy. Mitra’s mom, Behjat, needed to wait 16 years earlier than she may go away for the U.S. too. Urich herself grew up in Vermont and has by no means been to Iran.

If solely the movie matched the wealthy potential of those girls’s tales. In her first function, Urich talks to her mom and grandmother and explores her personal emotions about her heritage, however the documentary veers uneasily between the cultural and private points, by no means absolutely analyzing both one.

Joonam is clearly loving. The title is a Farsi time period of endearment, and far of the movie reveals fraught household dynamics, that extraordinarily well-worn theme. However there may be too little social and political context, the very factor that units the household aside. The ladies’s tales about Iran and their recollections of it arrive in unsatisfying fragments. Sometimes previous household pictures, dwelling films and memorabilia seem on display — Mitra’s airplane ticket from Tehran to New York, video of a younger Behjat and her husband on their farm in Iran — and the movie would have been enriched by extra of that archival materials.

The documentary begins in snowy Vermont, the place Urich is attempting to be taught Farsi so she will talk straight together with her grandmother, who speaks only a smattering of English. Behjat is a powerful presence, a tricky previous soul who was married at 14 and whose story is teased all through. She is staying with the household of their Vermont farmhouse (Urich’s father showing often within the background), the place a lot of the movie is shot.

Mitra is the pivotal determine, the Farsi-English translator between her personal mom and daughter. In one of the crucial revealing but irritating scenes, Mitra is on the hair salon, speaking to her Thai-born hairdresser about their experiences as immigrant moms. In a point out that merely flies by, Mitra says that two of her uncles had been executed, her father imprisoned and that she herself nonetheless has PTSD from her days in Iran. This talky scene is intriguing but, like a lot within the movie, fails to fill within the particulars of Mitra’s recollections.

As a substitute, it leads right into a extra surreal part, with a montage of pictures, together with a video of a lady who seems to be the younger Mitra dancing in a Pierrot costume, pictures of her in her youth, video of protestors chanting on the streets of Iran, with Khomeini’s face on banners. That impressionistic contact stands out as a result of the movie is extra typically mundane and visually uninteresting (odd, as a result of Urich went to the R.I. College of Design). In a extra typical scene, Mitra and Behjat sit at a small-town July 4th parade, having a dialog in regards to the vans and horses passing by.

The movie later circles again to the significance of Mitra’s recollections. Urich asks her grandmother to inform the story about Behjat’s personal grandfather’s homicide. “He was a martyr,” Behjat says. Mitra explodes. She says she was traumatized by listening to that violent story as a toddler, and refuses to translate out of concern that telling it on digital camera even now will put Sierra in peril. The PTSD Mitra referred to earlier is apparent, and her visceral response says greater than the rest within the documentary about how a harrowing previous lingers. Behjat by no means does inform the story of her grandfather’s homicide, not less than not on digital camera.

The current hazard is actual. Urich tells her Farsi instructor that she longs to go to Iran, however is aware of it could be too harmful in the present day. It’s past the movie’s scope to grapple with the present upheaval and women-led protests in that nation. Even so, Joonam is simply too scattershot and distanced from tradition and politics to resonate with the information — doubtlessly the movie’s biggest draw — in additional than a glancing method.