Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s Oscar-nominated short documentary “A Girl in the River” examines an attempted honor killing in the Pakistani province of Punjab.
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A Powerful Documentary About Pakistan’s Honor Killings
BY ROZINA ALI
In their version of events, they would beat Saba Qaiser, shoot her in the head, stuff her in a bag, and drop her body into the river. Her father and uncle would do this in the middle of the night, when no one was watching, and no one would know what happened to her.
But that’s not how events unfolded. When the filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy reached Saba in Gujranwala, a city in Pakistan’s Punjab province, she was recovering in the hospital. She had escaped by holding on to the bushes near the water’s edge and then climbing out to find help. The bullet had missed Saba’s brain but sliced open her left cheek, bursting a blood vessel that left her eye swimming in a pool of red. That haunting image of Saba begins Obaid Chinoy’s documentary “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness,” which is one of this year’s Oscar contenders for short documentary, and which will air on HBO in March. (Obaid Chinoy, who is Pakistani, previously won an Oscar for her documentary “Saving Face,” about Pakistani women who were victims of acid attacks.)
The official government figures for honor killings in Pakistan total approximately a thousand a year, but unofficial estimates are higher, around three to four thousand. Women and girls are killed by husbands, fathers, brothers, and other relatives if they are considered to have brought “shame” to the family, for example by eloping—as in Saba’s case—or being suspected of having relations with a man out of wedlock. In a particularly famous case in the spring of 2014, one that spurred international outcry, Farzana Parveen’s family stoned her to death outside a courthouse in Lahore in daytime, as people, including the police, watched. The contrast between that public display of retribution and Saba’s case—a girl taken at night to an isolated waterway—is saddening. How many ways are there to erase a woman for the sake of a man’s honor? And then to erase her from memory: Obaid Chinoy discovered Saba’s story from a few lines in a newspaper.
This discovery spurred a yearlong process of telling the story not just of a failed honor killing (which is unusual) but of everything that happens after. When I spoke with Obaid Chinoy on the phone, she told me that she had waited to make a film about honor killings until she could tell it from the perspective of someone who survived. I can see why. In many ways, it is everything that comes after that night by the river that makes the documentary so chilling: how a girl battles a community that is obsessed with preserving honor and that sympathizes with her father, even though he intended to kill his daughter. The film shows how Saba struggles with Pakistan’s “forgiveness law,” a loophole in the justice system that allows families to forgive the murderers involved in honor killings, and ultimately lets them go free.
“People are so obsessed with the concept of honor—literally across Pakistan,” Obaid Chinoy told me, her voice laden with urgency. “I want people to see honor killings as premeditated, cold-blooded murder, a reality that gets garbled in wording about ‘honor’ and ‘shame.’ ” For a country, like Pakistan, that has been fetishized and misunderstood in the West, there’s a danger of seeing “A Girl in the River” as part of a tired narrative—another example of a movie or documentary clumsily portraying the religious extremism that oppresses women. But Obaid Chinoy’s filmmaking reveals the different forces at play: the state’s involvement versus the sway of local elders; an individual woman’s rights versus the need for family compromise; pressures of poverty and circumstance versus the fight for justice; the insistence of both Saba and her father, separately, that God is on their side. And, of course, there is Saba herself, who is remarkable in her self-confidence, who took the filming matter-of-factly, and who is adamant about wanting people to know about her experience, wanting to make an example of her father and uncle.
“It’s important that people start thinking of killing wives and daughters as a crime, because so few people go to jail for it,” Obaid Chinoy told me. “If people don’t start thinking about it as a crime, how are we going to change it? Is this part of our religion, our culture? How can we allow this to happen?” While another Academy nomination is a mark of prestige for Obaid Chinoy and Pakistan on the international stage, she knows how useful the nod from Hollywood can be as a tool to rally for change back home. Honor killings don’t have to keep happening, an ineradicable part of a stubborn culture or of religious practices. The government could do much to stop them. What surprised Obaid Chinoy while making the film—and what will surprise the viewers paying attention—are the government services that worked in Saba’s favor: the emergency hotline that sent an ambulance right away, the doctor who operated on her immediately, the police who worked tirelessly to bring in her father and uncle, and the pro-bono lawyer who supported Saba if she didn’t want forgive her relatives. What remains is to challenge the parts of the system that didn’t work. One result has been an online campaign launched by the film’s team that calls for legislation that will criminalize honor killings in Pakistan.
Obaid Chinoy plans to hold screenings of “A Girl in the River” in colleges and schools across Pakistan once the film launches. But it was the Oscar nomination that seemed to prompt Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to recognize the killings as an urgent problem. He congratulated Obaid Chinoy and thenvowed to eradicate honor killings. (Let’s see how Sharif develops these efforts in the months ahead, and how he works with his brother, who is the current chief minister of Punjab, the province where Saba currently lives only a few alleyways from her father’s home, in Gujranwala.) Meanwhile, through Obaid Chinoy’s storytelling, Saba continues to powerfully embody a topic that is too often brushed off as another remote news event, another disappeared woman. As one female writer in Pakistan recently remarked, “If that’s the only way to get our foot in through the door to the power corridors, let’s hope Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy wins an Oscar every year.”
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