From Fox news: On January 29, after a ten-week trial and fifteen hours of deliberations, a Canadian jury returned with a verdict of guilty to first degree murder for Mohammed Shafia, 58, Tooba Yahya, 42 (his second wife), and Hamed, 21, their son. They were found guilty of conspiring to and of having murdered Mohammed's first wife, Rona Mohammed Amir, 50, and Tooba Yahya's three daughters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, because they refused to wear hijab, wore Western, sometimes "sexy" clothing, dared to have boyfriends, and, in their father's words, "dishonored" and "betrayed" both "their family and Islam."
The short paragraph above is from a news story. I read it by some coincidence just before I saw "Land Gold Women". This film, as far as I know is fiction. However, it presents a story of an Indian-English family in just such a situation. The daughter has grown up in England and is a bright girl who wants to go to university. She dresses in jeans, doesn't cover her head, and secretly even has a non-Indian English boyfriend. Her uncle arrives from India with a proposal for an arranged marriage which would take her back to India to become the wife of a man she has never met. When she defies her family and refuses, then runs away to the English boyfriend, the consequences escalate to an climax which no one wants but which no one finds themselves able or willing to stop.
A great strength of this film is that it presents the characters and the situation in which they find themselves in a way that makes them all real, believable, and understandable. We know what happened almost from the very beginning. What the film does is make us understand why it happened, what the people involved thought and felt, and how the traditional views of a father towards his family and culture and the modern western perspective of his daughter created a chasm that even years of western life and a loving family relationship was unable to bridge.
This is one of the best films I have seen this year, perhaps one of the best ever. By the end, I felt like the characters were people I knew. Early in the film, the father and daughter find themselves discussing the play "Antigone", another story about a father and daughter where the conflict between the father's authority and perceived responsibilities clashed with what his daughter felt compelled to do, also with tragic consequences.
As I watched this film, my thoughts kept returning to the Fox News story, and I almost felt that I was experiencing the members of that real family demanding from each other agreement to and acceptance of choices which the others found impossible, and with ultimately the same consequences.
The short paragraph above is from a news story. I read it by some coincidence just before I saw "Land Gold Women". This film, as far as I know is fiction. However, it presents a story of an Indian-English family in just such a situation. The daughter has grown up in England and is a bright girl who wants to go to university. She dresses in jeans, doesn't cover her head, and secretly even has a non-Indian English boyfriend. Her uncle arrives from India with a proposal for an arranged marriage which would take her back to India to become the wife of a man she has never met. When she defies her family and refuses, then runs away to the English boyfriend, the consequences escalate to an climax which no one wants but which no one finds themselves able or willing to stop.
A great strength of this film is that it presents the characters and the situation in which they find themselves in a way that makes them all real, believable, and understandable. We know what happened almost from the very beginning. What the film does is make us understand why it happened, what the people involved thought and felt, and how the traditional views of a father towards his family and culture and the modern western perspective of his daughter created a chasm that even years of western life and a loving family relationship was unable to bridge.
This is one of the best films I have seen this year, perhaps one of the best ever. By the end, I felt like the characters were people I knew. Early in the film, the father and daughter find themselves discussing the play "Antigone", another story about a father and daughter where the conflict between the father's authority and perceived responsibilities clashed with what his daughter felt compelled to do, also with tragic consequences.
As I watched this film, my thoughts kept returning to the Fox News story, and I almost felt that I was experiencing the members of that real family demanding from each other agreement to and acceptance of choices which the others found impossible, and with ultimately the same consequences.