2019 Third Coast / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition
Best Documentary: Foreign Language
Price of Secrecy is a hybrid podcast series addressing familial, cultural, social, and legal constraints that contribute to the silence around the issue of child sexual abuse in Iran. It is produced through close collaboration with lawyers, psychologists, psychotherapist and social activists that deal with this issue professionally in Iran. With their help, personal stories of adult survivors of child sexual abuse have been collected and presented in hybrid forms that blur the line between fact and fiction. The sensitivity of the topic often causes resistance in the audience to engage with such taboo subjects. Using the hybrid form has enabled a safe distance through dramatization and fictionalization, whilst allowing a contextualization of these stories within the wider socio-cultural landscape.