About the Film: About the Film: In rural Pakistan, families with disabled children have few options. Some desperate parents keep their children locked up or even chained. When athletic coaches from Karachi persuade the parents of three teenagers -- Ghulam, Sana, Sajawal – to allow the kids to participate in a sports training program as part of a Special Olympics initiative, the families glimpse the hope that living with disability doesn’t have to mean that their children are "useless." But they and the coaches must confront the question of what sports can—and cannot—change. Over a one-year period, Iranian-American filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian follows three disabled children and their families as they grapple with shame and prejudice in rural Pakistan to realize new talents and a sense of belonging through sports. Intimate and unflinching, hopeful and tragic, AS FAR AS THEY CAN RUN is a fascinating look at those who are struggling to find acceptance and worth in a society that had relegated them to the margins.

About the Filmmaker: Tanaz Eshaghian is an Iranian-American, Emmy-nominated, documentary filmmaker whose career has spanned two decades. She left Iran with her mother at the age of six and grew up in New York City. In Love Iranian-American Style, completed in 2006, she filmed her traditional Iranian family, both in New York and Los Angeles, documenting their obsession with marrying her off and her own cultural ambivalence. For her début feature-length film, Be Like Others, a provocative look at men in Iran choosing to undergo sex change surgery, she returned to Iran for the first time in twenty-five years. Be Like Others, a BBC 2, France 5, ITVS production, premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Teddy special jury prize at the Berlinale - Berlin International Film Festival, and was nominated for an Emmy award. In 2011, she completed Love Crimes of Kabul, a documentary filmed inside a women’s prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, focusing on “moral crimes,” for HBO. In 2018, she directed The Last Refugees, followingone of the last Syrian refugee families allowed in the U.S. before President Trump’s Muslim travel ban. Her latest film, the 39-minute short subject documentary As Far As They Can Run, from MTV Documentary Films, is an intimate portrait of 3 intellectually disabled children in rural Pakistan who have been deemed "useless" by their communities and manage to find some acceptance and a place in society through sports.