Quest for honor

US Documentary Feature Films
Kurdistan/U.S.A., 2008, 60 mins., color

I thought about this movie all night long after I watched it. Yes, I called it a “movie”. For it has so much tension and climax going on and you wouldn’t even believe it’s actually a documentary. Even the way it started with a CNN news clip that makes you believe more you’re watching some kind of investigation murder movie.

The story line of this project is very well-organized and chronological. We followed Runak Faraj, the editor from Women Media Center, to experience the fight for human rights in Kurdistan. In a men-dominant society where women are usually powerless, they have to be so obedient that it seems their lives are worthless as well. And Women Media Center become where local women would go when they are under death threat or feel under pressure.

The more you watch, the more your heart sinks. That is probably why the director actually inserted lots of empty shots/landscape shots that sort of gave you relief moments because the story itself was too sad to handle at one time. The sound quality is very good that we can hear every single word when they spoke, especially at the outdoor scene where they found the body of Nesrin. The story ended in a way that there seemed no progress neither in their investigation nor in human rights, but it actulaly made it to raise people's awareness in helping those victims. However, things should be taken more slowly just like what the mayor implied. It's really a good idea to start with media, say, the newspaper publication that Runak Faraj works with.

One interesting thing I've noticed is that in this 60-minutes intensive documentary project, you can see how subjects were comfortable in front of the camera(just like a movie!), which probably means a certain amount of time that the director Mary Ann Smothers Bruni had spent with them before she started to shoot. After a 30-second CNN news clip at the very beginning of Quest for Honor, it went straight right to the phone call – about a woman’s death. How coincidently it was! Because sometimes the moment you want never comes, I wonder how they made it.

I admire her courage because she might be taken as an intruder from local perspective. Anything could have happened to her in the name of HONOR. However, I’m not quite sure if the project is based on western point of view to look other cultures. For some of the most bizarre cultural phenomenon in this world, there are a lot of times that western countries take these cultures as “wrong” based on what they think is “right" especiially when it comes to human rights.I'm not saying that killing somebody else by one's wish from other culture is none of our business. But as an audience, I would like to know more about how they get the idea of being “honor” and “dishonor” and how they develop this way of thinking. If we can take a more in-depth approach to find out the origin of this problem, the solution might be come up as well. It would be much more balanced and informative in terms of journalistic perspective if the director found out more about the belief of these men and women.