SUFFRAGETTE FEATURES EVENTS IN LONDON DURING 1912
In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s book A Vindication of the Rights of Women launched a movement. Suffragette, directed by Sarah Gavron, takes place in London during 1912, when the movement’s leader Emmeline Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep) urges suffragettes to engage in civil disobedience, though titles indicate that the episodes during that year were only a part of a larger struggle. The focus is on a Maud Watts (played by Carey Mulligan), who works in a bedsheet washing-drying-delivery company alongside some suffragettes. Watts is tapped by a colleague to testify in front of Prime Minister David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller), whom she tells that she has not really thought much about exercising the franchise. Much of the film hangs on her transformation from someone frightened as suffragettes break windows in an upscale Oxford Street store into a hardened protester. Filmviewers behold the use of dynamite, mass arrests and brutality of women protesters, fasting and forced feeding in prison, and the martyrdom of Natalie Davison (Emily Wilding Press), who throws her body at the king’s horse at the Epson Derby and dies four days later, resulting in a mass funeral. But women in England had to wait until 1918 to gain some limited suffrage and were finally granted equal voting rights in 1928. Titles at the end inform that thousands of women were arrested and then lists the various countries that gave women the right to vote, with special emphasis on Islamic countries, but oddly excludes Hawaiʽi, perhaps because their rights were granted in 1840 but rescinded in the kingdom’s second constitution of 1852. The Political Film Society has nominated Suffragette as best film on human rights of 2015. MH
DUKHTAR IS ABOUT ANOTHER MUSLIM GIRL TRAPPED BY TRADITION
Among recent films focusing on how “women’s lib” is needed in some Islamic countries, The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008) is perhaps the most tragic. Last year’s Difret was more hopeful, reporting how arranged marriage kidnappings and rapes were recently banned in Ethiopia, but that is not a Muslim country. In this year’s Dukhtar (Daughter), directed by Afia Nathaniel, innocent 10-year-old Zainab (played by Saleha Arif) is betrothed to Tor Gul (Abdullah Jan), as arranged by her father to resolve a bloody feud between families living in mountainous Pakistan. But Zainab escapes before the wedding with her mother, Allah Rakhi (Samiya Mumtaz), who is a victim of an earlier arranged marriage. While both Zainab’s father and Tor Gul try to track them down, they are fortunately picked up on the road by truck driver Sohail (Mohib Mirza), a disenchanted former mujahideen fighter in Afghanistan, who finds sanctuary for them with his brother in another mountainous ridge of northwest Pakistan. Although Sohail tries to develop a romance with Rakhi, she is homesick for her mother in Lahore, so the trio goes there to visit during a festival. But being in public is no place for a betrothed girl to hide, and a happy ending is not in the script. For portraying the tragic life of females in rural Pakistan, the Political Film Society has nominated Dukhtar as best film on human rights of 2015. The Political Film Society does not give awards to documentaries, but the simultaneous release in Los Angeles of He Named Me Malala, based on the activism of 2014 Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, strikes the same chord. MH