Take One Action 2013: Salma

Sisters is a new strand in Take One Action Film Festival, and according to its programme it aims to “cast a positive and critical lens on the vital role played by women in global development, activism and environmental sustainability, as well as injustices resulting from unjust gender norms.” Salma, the latest feature from the ever brilliant Kim Longinotto (Divorce Iranian Style, Pink Saris), certainly fits the bill.

Salma centres on the 44-year-old poet of the title, whose life reads as a series of abuses. She was abandoned by her mother as a baby to be raised by her 7-year-old aunt – "I suppose I was too young to care," is her birth mother’s brazen explanation – before spending her adolescent years locked in a one-window room, as is the norm for pubescent girls in her community; then her birth mother guilted her into marriage by claiming she was terminally ill and that her dying wish was to attend her daughter’s wedding – Salma’s mother, as we see in the film, is still fit as an ox. Once married her incarceration continued, and her husband, Malick, would keep a jar of acid above their bed as a threat to keep his wife in line.

Remarkably, though, Salma overcame all these obstacles to become one of India's most acclaimed modern poets. Even more remarkable is the fact that Salma remains on amicable terms with the people who have tried so hard to oppress her. “I learned an awful lot from Salma about families,” says Longinatto after the film’s UK premiere at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, “how you can be in a very difficult situation with your family but it doesn’t stop you loving them.”

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“People who break the rules, people who are forerunners of change, often have very very difficult lives” – Kim Longinotto

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Salma’s life story would make for a fiery polemic but Longinatto opts for calm observation over melodrama. There is heat here, though, and it comes from the fission between the pleasant way in which Salma and her family interact and the horrors of the way they have behaved towards her in the past. “You have Salma and her mum cooking in the kitchen, but then you have Salma telling us what it was like for her growing up,” says Longinatto regarding this palpable tension. “So on the surface everything looks fine, but then she tells us actually what it was like to live in the family. They have all this unhappiness and pain that they’ve learned to live with and put aside.”

This façade, Longinatto explains, is one she recognises from her own life. “I had a very difficult relationship with my family, particularly my father, who was very much like [Salma’s husband] Malick,” she says. “I puzzled for a long time about why my dad was so angry, he was always torturing my mum and shouting. But if you met us, if you came to our house, they would put on a show for you, and I think that’s what’s so interesting about what Salma has done and how brave she is to tell the real story.”

For all Salma’s bravery, it becomes clear throughout the film that defying the social mores of the community in which she was raised, and still lives, has left her isolated. Her relationships with the mother who abandoned her and the husband who imprisoned her, meanwhile, are still filled with unresolved issues and anxieties. It’s clearly not easy being a pioneer. “People who break the rules, people who are forerunners of change, often have very very difficult lives,” agrees Longinatto. “They often feel they are outsiders. They don’t fit in, but they make life better for us to come.”

Has Salma’s fight been worth the alienation she now feels from her own people? After the film’s screening at Doc/Fest this question was raised during a Q&A with Salma. Here’s her response:

“Until I was 32 I could hardly cross a road. And today I have come here, across the world, all by myself. So it’s symbolic of the independence that I have achieved. Of course I had to pay a huge price to achieve that. My relationships have often been fraught. I have had to struggle very hard in order to attain that. But it is my right, and it’s worth the price I paid.”