Love, Honour and Obey

In Banaz - A Love Story, detective Caroline Goode explains that solving a murder is often motivated by helping a victim’s family to cope with their loss. Bringing the killers of Banaz Mahmod to justice, by contrast, involved convicting her own relations, who killed the young woman because she threatened their ‘honour’ by falling in love with someone other than her husband. A disturbing account of oppression and brutality, director Deeyah Thathaal’s film is effective in educating its audience about a misogynistic practice thought to claim the lives of around five thousand people a year.

The idea of family as a collective drives the practice of honour killing. Banaz, as a piece of activist filmmaking, is instrumental in describing this cultural idea in detail. The Mahmods, originally from Iraq and part of a Kurdish community living in London, believed their status to be in jeopardy because Banaz walked out of her abusive marriage. Deeyah’s impassioned work delves into the cultural clash for people of Kurdish descent moving to western countries where women are granted more autonomy and men must give up some of their power. One of the points raised by commentators is a lack of understanding and the reluctance of authorities to interfere in the customs of ethnic minorities – in this case resulting in shocking failures on the part of the police to protect Banaz. This documentary thus serves as a useful instructional stratagem.

There’s a difficulty in communicating sexism in non-western contexts through cinema. Stereotyping of male and female roles in Middle Eastern countries in particular is rife and although this doesn’t mean that depictions of domination have no basis in reality, they are only one part of people’s lives. Western media are often guilty of concentrating on negatives of non-white ethnicities. Some excellent fictional films of the last fifteen years – such as those of Samira Makhmalbaf, Marzieh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman, and GFF standout Wadjda – offer more nuanced interpretations of female experiences in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia. Banaz is an example of how documentary methods can overcome racist archetypes through exhaustive treatment of their topic. The horrific story is told by a director who has herself suffered honour-based violence, adding to Banaz’s honesty and truthfulness. Her film will hopefully help spread knowledge of a subject not usually given the meticulous attention it requires.