Enemies of Happiness
March 4, 2007 at 5:58 p.m.
Regardless of your political viewpoints on the war in Afghanistan, Enemies of Happiness is a movie that will forever touch your heart. After watching Malalai Joya’s struggle to bring democracy and women’s rights to her country, I found myself wondering why I didn’t watch more documentaries.
Joya, who is considered by many to be the most famous woman in Afghanistan, recently ran in and won a seat on Parliament in Afghanistan’s first-ever free election. Even though there have been multiple assassination attempts on her life, she was and is still willing to speak out against the horrible injustices of the Talliban. I doubt there was a single person in the audience who was not impressed with her bravery.
Aside from the main story of Joya’s election campaign, the film also revealed that Joya helped local community members with various problems such as spousal abuse and divorce. The story of Rahela, a teenage girl who was supposedly promised as the third wife of a man older than her father further highlighted the lack of power that women in Afghanistan have over their own lives. It made me glad that people like Joya are working to make a difference. The significance of her contributions to Afghanistan’s future is almost hard to comprehend, and all at the age of 28.
Filmmaker Eva Mulvad captured the everyday life of Joya and her people, and she did it in a way that will impact anyone who watches it. Mulvad said after the film that the difficulty of documentary filmmaking is that you have to trust reality to be interesting. Well, Mulvad lucked out, because in Joya’s case, interesting would be an understatement.
Comments on this post