The result is a film that gives voice to a more nuanced and complex narrative that, at the very least, belies popular perceptions of the burqa.
I recently spoke with Ahmed over Skype about her documentary film, which premiered at the 2012 DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver. The film, she says, has sparked honest dialogue about the burqa. For the filmmaker, who recently took to social media to dispel inaccuracies about the burqa when the debates hit close to home in Canada, the value of frank discussions on this issue has never been more vital.
Ahmed is happy the documentary continues to reach diverse audiences in Canada and the U. S., but she hopes to show it to men and women inside Afghanistan and other Islamic nations.
What follows is our discussion about filmmaking, activism, and women.
Q: How did you come to be a filmmaker and did you study film knowing you were interested in pursuing this work?
A: I was interested in journalism at first but realized I wanted to do more than the one-minute story. I wanted to go deeper. It’ s important to make people think. Books and news articles certainly make us think and that’ s very important, but if you want social change, you have to make people care. You have to make them feel. And film does that for me.
As a woman from Afghanistan, having lived in both the East and the West, and the mother of two girls, women’ s issues are important to me. But I did not consider making a film about the burqa until I was married and living in Iran and had to veil myself. It
A true understanding of the burqa and its history is critical.
Brishkay Ahmed
triggered something. I guess I thought there was a certain level of what was acceptable.
Sometimes we can be blind to things. We say,‘ Oh that’ s okay because they live in that part of the world.’ In Iran, I saw a young girl, maybe 18 or 19 years old, dragged into a police car by two officers— one, a woman in full chador( full body cloak commonly worn by women in Iran)— because her scarf was not worn properly. It angered me.
Suddenly, I realized: this is what I care about. I’ m going to use film, and I need to go to Afghanistan. A lot of activism— even art, in general, comes from a place of anger. For me, it’ s certainly rooted there.
Q: The film opens with a scene on a busy Vancouver street. You are dressing a woman in a burqa. The scene ends with an interesting interaction with two Afghan men, who, after observing the scene, share an anecdote about a woman who was dragged by a bus because her burqa was caught in the door. Why did you choose to begin the film that way?
A: Having been in Iran and seeing incidents like the one with the young girl, I wanted to see how people would react if they actually saw a burqa on the street. Would they be curious? Would they ignore it? In the West we are socialized to be politically correct and in doing so we, at times, confuse what we think is culture with oppression.
I asked my friend to walk across the street wearing the burqa. Coincidentally, Afghan men were having coffee at the Starbucks nearby. The conversation with them brought a kind of seriousness to the experiment. 35 OF NOTE