A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness

This movie documents the outcome for one young lady within the judicial system after an honor killing. Coming out of this, I had to keep in mind that this is one story coming out Pakistan and having never visited Pakistan, I'm unsure of how indicative it is of the country's whole society. What happened to Saba was horrendous and the movie portrays honor killings as common and are only increasing based on current laws. While the laws give more weight to men and treats women as second class citizens, the movie does give hope that there's people who're trying to change the laws. One thing that I think this movie does well is that it interviews both Saba, the family she married into, as well as Saba's immediate family. The interviewers were also able to talk to the police and Saba's original lawyer, prior to the elders giving her a new one and were able to talk with the elders of the community. With that said, I think that the movie was too short to give a full picture of all of the judicial proceedings and the discussions happing.

This film is set in Pakistan and is about so-called 'honor killings'--when families murder their own daughters in order to save face with their neighbors. The particular subject of this film is a young lady named Saba. Saba married a man despite her family not giving her permission and her father and uncle dealt with it by shooting her and dumping her into the river. However, Saba's case is unusual because she actually survived the gunshot to her face and the film follows the case through the Pakistani court and to its ultimate resolution...or lack of resolution. The film is hellaciously depressing but fortunately the gunshot wound isn't as horrible to see post-surgically as you might imagine and Saba is rather inspiring because of her inner strength. It's also an amazing film because everyone talks so openly about what occurred and the father seems incredibly proud of his actions and by the end of the film he is elated that he maintained his sense of honor by trying to murder his daughter.

By the way, if you are curious, the filmmakers and folks they interviewed were careful to reiterate that these honor killings are not in any way approved of in the Koran but are more cultural than religious in nature.

UPDATE: This film did take the Oscar for Best Documentary Short.

The Girl in the River - for me - is a film about the miracle, first and foremost. Because not everybody who can survive after gunshot in the face, and bag over head, and drowning. The young woman survived. And yet. The film shows forgiveness under pressure from the surrounding society. Not natural forgiveness. The troubled society shown in the film was simply trying to find balance. That's all. That's why the girl was pressured to forgive her father. Nothing changed inside the people. The situation didn't teach them anything. But I hope this film will teach us something. After watching the film, I looked for information about what happened to Saba and her husband 10 years after the filming of the film. I want to believe that they are doing well.

A country that is so strict with religion has such a loose and imperfect legal system. Such a comparison is to make people understand that the system, religion, is nothing more than a pretext for maintaining their reasonable and unequal treatment of others.

If you like true stories told very well, but briefly, and you'd like to get a leg up in an Oscar pool, then this review is for you! In my continuing effort to see as many Oscar nominees as possible, I took advantage of the opportunity to see the shorts.TV theatrical presentation "Oscar Nominated Short Films 2016: Documentary" (NR, 3:00 – with 10 min. intermission). Here's a brief, spoiler-free summary and evaluation of one of those five films...

"A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness" (40 min.) – Saba was an 18-year-old Pakistani girl who fell in love with and married a young man of whom her family did not approve. For this "crime", her father and uncle kidnapped her from the home of her new husband's family, drove her to a riverbank, shot her in the head, placed her in a sack and threw her in the river. Saba was one of over 1,000 women targeted for "honor killings" every year in Pakistan, but unlike most of those nameless victims, Saba survived. We see her in the hospital being treated for her wounds, then we follow her as she returns to live with her husband and his family and is pressured to drop the charges against her uncle and father and publicly "forgive" them. All the key players in this real-life drama give interviews in which they tell us about their roles in this story and openly discuss their points of view. We even get to sit in on a meeting between local tribal elders and Saba's lawyer, trying to find a resolution to the case. With remarkable access, a flare for story-telling and the ability to present all points of view without judgment, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has directed an important and outstanding film which rises above the label of "documentary short" and demands to be seen by everyone who cares about our common humanity. "A+"

The other four films in the shorts.TV theatrical presentation "Oscar Nominated Short Films 2016: Documentary" are… "Body Team 12" "Chau, beyond the Lines" "Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah" "Last Day of Freedom"