‘Girl’ eyes a bigger prize – ‘Silence’ competes

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NEW YORK, Feb 26, (Agencies): Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy made history by winning Pakistan’s first Oscar four years ago. Now she’s back in Hollywood, hoping to scoop a second Academy Award for her harrowing film about a teenage girl shot in the face by her own family.

But while other Oscar nominees obsess about hair and make-up, the 37-year-old filmmaker has a much bigger fight on her hands: how to stop honor killings in Pakistan, where she says more than 1,000 women are murdered each year by male relatives for allegedly bringing shame on the family.

“A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness” tells the story of 19-year-old Saba who was beaten, shot and thrown into the river after she ran off to marry her fiance, whom her family initially accepted — and then decided was too poor.

The 40-minute film goes head to head with four other nominees in the documentary short subject category at Sunday’s Oscars in Hollywood.

Survivors of honor killings are rare and the film offers a stark look at the pain — physical and emotional — inflicted on Saba, her extraordinary resilience and ultimate failure to see her father and uncle convicted.

They beat her, shot her in the face and dumped her in a burlap sack in the river.

At the last moment, she tilted her head, meaning the bullet grazed her cheek instead of shattering her skull. Somehow she managed to cling to the bushes and pull herself out of the water. She went to police and to hospital.

Ordeal

Obaid-Chinoy, who read about her ordeal one morning in the newspaper, tracked her down and filmed Saba’s story over eight to nine months in 2014.

In Pakistan, a loophole in the law allows the perpetrators of so-called honor killings to get off scot-free if they are pardoned by their family.

Saba initially seeks a conviction, but eventually relents under the weight of pressure from her brother-in-law and community elders who say it is better to resolve enmity than let it fester.

Obaid-Chinoy wants to change that. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif hosted a screening of the film in Islamabad last week and has promised to rid Pakistan of the crime by tightening up the legislation.

The filmmaker told AFP she had hoped for a positive response but admitted such an unprecedented reaction had taken her by surprise.

“If we get this law passed, it will be all worth it,” she said by telephone from Los Angeles after flying in from Pakistan, battling jet lag and an avalanche of pre-Oscar publicity.

Indonesia’s first film production to be nominated for an Oscar is at once a source of national pride and of shame for the world’s third-largest democracy.

“The Look of Silence” centres on one of the worst massacres since World War Two, when at least 500,000 people died in violence that raged after then-general Suharto and the military took power following an abortive coup in 1965. A million or more people were jailed, suspected of being communists.

Up for best documentary at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony, the film has forced many to confront one of the darkest periods in Indonesia’s history and remains banned from commercial cinemas.

“Successive governments have failed to address the events of 1965 as a lesson that needs to be learned by the nation,” said Muhammad Nurkhoiron of the national commission on human rights.

“There needs to at least be official recognition but that hasn’t happened. But we feel happy this film has been nominated so the world can see those events are finally being questioned.”

Government officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the film.

Despite the ban, “The Look of Silence”, which has an Indonesian co-producer, is available online and had hundreds of private screenings across Indonesia.

This year’s nomination will be the second for director Joshua Oppenheimer, whose similarly-themed “The Act of Killing” lost out in the best documentary category in 2013.

While the first film unveiled some of 1965’s unrepentant killers who still remain free, “The Look of Silence” tells the same tale through the eyes of a victim’s family.

In the film Adi Rukun comes face to face with the alleged torturers and killers of his three siblings.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve done in my life,” Rukun said in a telephone interview. “What I wanted was to hear a confession, but I saw them feel no remorse.”

The films go beyond tracking the cathartic journeys of those involved to show how many continue to turn a blind eye to past crimes.

“I hope the films will energise the movement in Indonesia against impunity and against a system based on fear and intimidation,” Oppenheimer told Reuters by telephone.

Indonesia began a transition to democracy in 1998 after more than three decades of authoritarian rule.

The 2014 election of Joko Widodo as president, the first leader to come from outside the country’s political and military establishment, offered hope to human rights activists that past violations would finally be addressed.

That has not happened, and last year Indonesia censored several events to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1965 killings.

“The hope is small,” said Nurkhoiron. “But these films are a step to reconciliation with the past.”

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