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Audiovisuals |
| Reprinted from the Middle East Studies
Association Bulletin, Winter 2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards). Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America |
The Day I Became a Woman (Iran) 2000 78 min Dir: Marziyeh Meshkini. Prod: Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Farsi with English subtitles. Distributed by: New Yorker Films, 16 W. 61st St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10023. Tel: 877/247‑6200. Fax: 212/307‑7855. Email: info@newyorkerfilms.com Web: www.newyorkerfilms.com “The Day I Became a Woman” portrays what it means to be born an Iranian woman. It takes the form of three linked individual stories: 1) Havva (Eve), 2) Ahoo (Gazelle), and 3) Hoora (Black‑eyed Beauty), all titles referring to crucial moments in one woman’s life. Havva depicts a girl who is ordered to wear chador by her mother and grandmother at her ninth birthday. The chador symbolically and literally brings her into an exclusively woman’s world. The scene of her boy playmate sticking out his face from the window and Havva, being outside, taking an initiative in letting him lick a lollipop she has half eaten is a compelling juxtaposition. It indicates her last autonomy which is eroding as the time gets closer to her being exactly nine years from the precise hour of her birth. After this day arrives, she can never speak to her friend again. Ahoo, a young unhappily married woman, faces interference from her elder brother, father, and husband even in her daily activities in her married life. Hence, defying her husband and family to ride in a women’s bike race symbolizes her desperation to escape, to assert her independence. Her father runs after her as she is biking away from them, and orders her not to ride, and not to get divorced, and not to bring dishonor to her family. Although she speeds up, hoping to hide in the group of bikers, she is persistently followed. This recurrent scene is like a nightmare. She is last seen surrounded by mounted kinsmen. The last story, Hoora, is about an aged woman on a shopping spree at the mall in Kish, one of Iran’s free trade zones. She is buying all the luxurious appliances and home furniture that she has always wanted but could not obtain during her marriage. Yet, the idea of having forgotten something she needed to buy bothers her. She eventually realizes that the something missing is the man she really wanted to marry. Here, the director shows how difficult it is for an Iranian woman to be free to choose her own husband. Hoora sees an image of such a man in young boys she encounters as if she is attempting to get back what she lost in her life. Her endeavor to retrieve what she has lost in life haunts her until the end. The scene that pictures her with all her new belongings―beds, chairs, refrigerators, stoves―loaded on rafts sailing toward a distant freighter while she watches from the shore with a smile, symbolizes that, with the end of her life, she has finally freed herself from her material and mental obsession. The theme of “The Day I Became a Woman” is profound: women’s oppression exists in patriarchy, tradition, and culture, which are all deeply rooted in Iran’s society. Thus, the audience can easily enter into the illusionary world―half real and half dream-like―which Director Meshkini has created. Hisae Nakanishi Nagoya University, Japan Murshidat: Female Primary Health Care Workers Transforming Society in Yemen. 1999 37 min Dir/Prod/Writer: Delores M. Walters. Distributed by the filmmaker, Director of Alana Cultural Center, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY 13346-1386 Tel: 315/228-7330. Email: dwalters@mail.colgate.edu Yemen’s health needs are serious. “Murshidat” cites Yemen as having the Arab world’s fastest growing population, despite its high infant, child, and maternal mortality rates. As medical services based mainly in large cities cannot adequately serve the predominantly rural population, community-based alternatives are needed. “Murshidat” provides an example of one such program. In the coastal Tihama city of Abs, female primary care workers, or murshidat, have been trained to perform basic health care and educate others about cleanliness, family planning, infant care, and nutrition. When filmmaker Walters conducted her anthropological doctoral fieldwork in Tihama in the early 1980s, the local health facility was practically dormant. When she returned ten years later, it was a bustling center for women and children. Walters credits the murshidat for the change: local women achieved what international health teams could not. The center was now used by all social groups of Abs society, including the most marginal. Walters collaborated with the murshidat in making this recruiting and training video for new health workers. In this promotional film, enticing both recruits and new funding sources, viewers watch the murshidat’s day-to-day activities and learn of benefits both to the community and to the murshidat themselves. As such, the video offers to public health courses an example of a successful community health program. Audiences wanting more probing anthropological analyses or a better picture of Yemeni culture will be disappointed. The spectacular shots of village streets, of groups and individuals, or of the remarkable terrain do not receive attention. Murshidat went into the market and to neighborhoods to reach people who might not come to the health center on their own. The opportunity to have females, not males, treat them encouraged women to use the center. Difficult births are now handled locally instead of in distant Hodaida. The program also benefits the murshidat: they earn their own money to support their families. While we see many community members in the video, we hear little from them beyond positive generalities about the health center. More substantive material from them would better convince us of the health center’s significance. As it is now, we must rely on the narrator’s and the murshidat’s words. As a medical anthropologist, I was disappointed in this film. It offers none of the interesting anthropological findings that often complexify public health messages, such as the reluctance to weigh babies for fear of harm from envious eyes, ways that largely illiterate audience members can misinterpret visual aids, and situations where contraceptive devices interfere with local understandings of the body. Instead, health, cleanliness, and nutrition messages are presented as daily work and signs of success. After watching “Murshidat,” we are left applauding the murshidat program and the murshidat, but not the film. For a more general audience, we await a next film, offering a deeper understanding of the Abs community by way of their health center. Beth Kangas University of Arizona A Wall of Silence (Turkey) 1997 54 min. Prod/Dir: Dorothée Forma, for Humanist Broadcasting Foundation, The Netherlands. Tel: +35 672 20 20. Fax +35 672 20 25. English, Turkish, French, German, with English subtitles. Courtesy of Center for Armenian Studies, California State U at Fresno, 5245 N. Backer Ave., PB4, Fresno, CA 93740-8001. Fax: 559/278-2129 Web: www.omroep.nl/human/-tv/muur/welcome.htm “A Wall of Silence” is not a film about the Armenian massacres; it is a statement regarding the official silence in Turkey on the Armenian massacres and the efforts of two men, an Armenian and a Turk, to break it. The question if the events of 1915 constituted a genocide is not argued but taken for granted. The concern of the film’s makers is instead for the traumatic consequences of those events, for the Armenians and also for the Turks. Vahakn Dadrian is the child of a wealthy Ottoman Armenian family that experienced the massacres, although he himself was not born until after World War I and became involved with the genocide issue through books. Taner Akcam was a leftist student radical who was imprisoned during the seventies and subsequently left Turkey for Germany. Dadrian, fearing reprisals, will never go back to his homeland, but Akcam has returned to Turkey to lecture on the need to open discussion on the Armenian question in order to promote a healthy Turkish democracy. Taboos and prohibitions about the past, he says, generate neurosis in a society as well as an individual, the more so if they are implemented by force. Both men study torture and historical violence, Dadrian to expose the crime of genocide and Akcam to expose its effects on the perpetrators. Much of the film tells a graphic story of the sufferings of the Dadrian family during the war. Dadrian, however, sees the violence as a consequence of the conflict between increasing liberal pressure for political equality in the Ottoman Empire and the religiously-based inequality inherent in Islamic law, although he calls it a conflict between Turks and Armenians. On the other hand, Akcam tells the story of Haci Halil of Urfa, who hid an Armenian family in his loft for a year and helped them escape to Syria. He extends a plea for more Haci Halils to come forward. Akcam himself returned to Turkey to set up a documentation center covering the years 1875-1925, but his ethnic research proved too politically sensitive for the universities and historical organizations of Turkey to support. He is suspected by Armenians of having a sinister agenda and by official Turkish sources of being a secret Armenian. In the end he was prevented from taking a job at a Turkish university and does not know how long he will be able to return for visits, while Dadrian is afraid to go at all—both signs of Turkish society’s need for healing. Will this film assist in the healing? After the first viewing I thought not, since it is far from evenhanded; it does not define genocide or discuss any aspect of the events except the brutal killing of Armenians. And despite its didacticism, it contains too many silences to be used in the classroom unless students are fully prepared. A second viewing, however, brought out the courage and persistence of these two men; perhaps their example will prove decisive. Linda T. Darling University of Arizona West Beirut (Lebanon) 1998 Dir: Ziad Doueiri. Prod: Rachid Boucharib, Jean Brehet for #B Production/La Sept Arte. Distributor: New Yorker Films, 16 W. 61st St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10023. Tel: 877/247-6200. Fax: 212/307-7855. Email: info@newyorkerfilms.com Web: www.newyorkerfilms.com Two early scenes set the tone for this intelligent film. The young protagonist, Tarek, uses a megaphone to sing the Lebanese national anthem, thereby drowning out the French hymn his schoolmates are compelled to sing. Tarek is not an especially patriotic Lebanese nor is he driven by anti-imperialist political sentiments. He is an adolescent with a naughty twinkle in his eye and a confident bravado in his stride. The ominous date of 13 April 1975 flashes on the screen–the official start of the Civil War. The fated bus advances towards the camera and…the rest is history. The scene, however, does not ideologically define the film. On the contrary, Doueiri ensures that none of the military participants or political leaders are glorified. Despite the massacre, the supposed defenders of the victims are presented, consistently, as thugs. Indeed, the war is merely a backdrop to the story of Tarek, refreshingly portrayed by the director’s younger brother Rami, and his pair of friends, the boisterous Omar and the quiet May. Their conversations, riddled with occasional English slang, convincingly capture the cadences and concerns of energetic adolescent Lebanese at the war’s outset. This trio meanders through the increasingly dangerous and divided Beirut searching for adventure and gradually coming of age. Tarek’s parents (the seasoned actors Joseph Bou Nassar and Carmen Lebbos) broaden the scope of the film to reflect both the determination and the panic of the average citizen trapped in a war zone. The father Riad, however, presents a conflicting image. He is excessively passive (often clad in his pajamas), refusing to acknowledge the consequences of battles, literally, in his back yard. As a leftist intellectual, his utterances sound worn and stale in the face of dynamic and dramatic change. Nevertheless, Riad’s pensive face and sonorous voice are mesmerizing. His wife Hala, who for much of the film combats his decision to stay in Beirut, later apologizes to him, and lovingly seems to acquiesce to his superior judgment. Tarek’s mother is more convincingly portrayed as the responsible yet understandably distraught family figure. Indeed, the women characters are cleverly, humorously drawn. The overweight abusive neighbor who spends most of her days yelling at those around her, is also seen seducing her husband in a tender loving scene. Oum Walid, the Madame of the legendary brothel, is another comic/profound figure. The juxtaposition of the young naive trio in a brothel is captured perfectly when they address her: “Bonjour Tante Oum Walid.” Her flabbergasted look is priceless. Doueiri, a cameraman on three of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, is clearly in his element here. The film oscillates between quasi-documentary style (with actual radio and video war footage), to amateur videotaping by the young boys, to sophisticated camera-play by the director. The resulting pastiche is coherent and telling. The Civil War persisted and persists―visible in the worn faces of the actors playing these parts more than twenty years after its outbreak. Elise Salem Fairleigh Dickinson University |
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