Quest for Honor (2010)
By Roxanne Downer
Nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the documentary Quest for Honor is a difficult film to watch. It immediately brought to mind the prolonged brutality in last summer’s Stoning of Soraya M., a similarly themed “based on a true story” drama about the honor killing of a woman, wrongly accused of adultery by her unscrupulous husband, in a rural Iranian village. But this chronicle of real people was somehow even more appalling.
The film follows Runak Faraj and Kalthoum, a pair of activist journalists at The Women’s Media Center, publisher of the only women’s newspaper in Iraqi Kurdistan. The journalists have been called by police, who have discovered the body of a woman, dressed in blue jeans and high heels, shot twice at close range. Further investigation uncovers that the woman, a local widow named Nasrin, recently had her children taken from her by her late husband’s family. They now refuse to claim her body or pursue the investigation of her killing. Runal, Kalthoum, and the police suspect that the family is responsible for her death. Paradoxically, only the victim’s family members can press charges against her murderer.
Photographer-turned-filmmaker Mary Ann Smothers Bruni takes her camera around to police, local political officials, the suspected family, and other women who have managed to escape in order to explore the phenomenon of honor killing, a deeply rooted tradition in Kurdish tribal culture. It’s a society, the film explains, where women are routinely sold or traded as brides (one scene shows a pre-pubescent girl who has been wed to an elderly man) and one where the honor of the family rests on the ability of the brides to accept their fates without resistance. And, although the government of Kurdistan has changed a previously existing Iraqi law so that killing a woman is the same as “killing a person,” punishments for the practice are rarely meted out.
Throughout the course of Quest for Honor, we meet a woman, Sefin, who was shot three times at a women’s shelter allegedly by her husband and brother-in-law; a young girl whose family threatened to tie her to cinder blocks and drown her for going out on a date with her boyfriend; and a mother–a victim herself–jailed for her role in the honor killing of her own daughter.
With little in the way of a score (a single Middle Eastern song plays only occasionally) or other Hollywood bells and whistles, it is the faces of the terrified women and their tormentors that telegraph the anguish of the situation. Quest for Honor is not the most innovatively lensed or edited documentary, but Bruni’s photographer’s eye serves her well–shots of interviewees in extreme close-up or framed off-center underscore the skewed nature of the “honor killing” way of thinking. Additional footage is provided via CNN of a murdered Sunni woman accused of secretly marrying a Shiite man and the camera phone of the police officer who discovered Nesrin’s body.
Despite the film’s location, born out of Bruni’s longstanding ties to the region, she is careful to remind audiences that the problem of domestic violence isn’t just about the Middle East or Islam. In the movie, Runak’s husband talks about it in the context of property, while the families themselves talk about it in terms of respect. In a post-viewing discussion, Bruni talks about it in larger terms. She says, “It’s not a women’s problem. It’s a societal problem. The men are victims too.”
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This Quest for Honor movie review is copyright 2009 Small World Marketing and Shane Rivers. This Quest for Honor review should not be reprinted without the permission of the copyright holders.
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