the saddest film I've ever seen
Mar. 20th, 2006 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
floatingleafSometimes I get this weird urge to broaden my cultural horizons by watching a very exotically foreign movie. This time it was Osama - the first film made in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban rule. It tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl forced to dress up as a boy to keep her mother and grandmother from starving (all the men in the family had been killed, and women aren't allowed to work). I didn't think it would hit me so hard - after all, I had studied Islamic culture and was far from ignorant about what happened there in recent years. Still, to actually see it on film (and a very realistically made one at that) is a different thing altogether. "Heartbreaking" doesn't even begin to cover it. I feel like I've been crushed by a load of bricks. Just in case this actually encourages anyone to watch the movie (it is a very good movie - just not for the faint of heart), I am putting spoilers under the cut.
So this breathtakingly beautiful and fragile young girl, despite trying her best to blend in and behave like a boy, is finally discovered, humiliated, punished in a spectacularly medieval manner and eventually "forgiven" by the judge and saved from stoning, only to be offered "in wedlock" to a man who could easily be her grandfather (and who already has several other wives, acquired in a similar manner - and locks each one of them up in a separate room, with a separate key, when he leaves the house for the day). The final scene of the film shows the old, decrepit tyrant getting ready for his wedding night (again, the girl is 12 years old).
I don't think I'll be exaggerating if I say that it doesn't take a feminist to react to this with murderous rage. Or even a woman. Just an emotionally developed human being. And if that's what religious fanaticism does to people, I want nothing to do with religion. Ever.
So this breathtakingly beautiful and fragile young girl, despite trying her best to blend in and behave like a boy, is finally discovered, humiliated, punished in a spectacularly medieval manner and eventually "forgiven" by the judge and saved from stoning, only to be offered "in wedlock" to a man who could easily be her grandfather (and who already has several other wives, acquired in a similar manner - and locks each one of them up in a separate room, with a separate key, when he leaves the house for the day). The final scene of the film shows the old, decrepit tyrant getting ready for his wedding night (again, the girl is 12 years old).
I don't think I'll be exaggerating if I say that it doesn't take a feminist to react to this with murderous rage. Or even a woman. Just an emotionally developed human being. And if that's what religious fanaticism does to people, I want nothing to do with religion. Ever.
