Tonight’s captivating documentary brought us into the lives of three Turkish women ‘who dare’ to go against the grain and get further education, stand up for women’s rights, create their own non-traditional art and dance professionally and publicly in a country where between 2002 and 2007 there were 1806 ‘honour killings’ and somewhere in the region of 5000 ‘honour suicides’, mainly over the question of women’s sexual autonomy. Belkis, Nur and Banu are, or were, all married, but only one of them is married completely happily to a man who supports her need to express herself – this was a focus of discussion in the panel afterwards where the Director Binnur Karaevli was asked whether the fact that they had all married at some time undermined what they stood for as women breaking the Middle-Eastern-Muslim-Woman mould. It’s a difficult issue in a country that seems to be going forward and backward with women’s rights; 10% of the first Parliament under Ataturk were women, now it is only 4%, and ‘women-friendly’ work laws have been introduced, such as that giving women five days a month off ‘menstruation leave’ and stopping them from ‘having to do’ heavy industry, such as working night shifts, actually reducing them to the level of children and the disabled. Read the rest of this entry »

In her short film Close Your Eyes and Look At Me, Lindsey Dryden explores the issue of personal freedom, body and ways of seeing. She talks to Kamila Kuc about her fascination with radical women and respect she has for Shabana, the subject of her film.

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