Women's Views on News

Posted: 10 Mar 2016 06:19 AM PST

And Malala took part in a Q+A to mark the launch of the DVD.

Malala Yousafzai was targeted by the Taliban and severely wounded by a gunshot when returning home on her school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley.

The then 15 year-old – she turned 18 in July 2015 – was singled out, along with her father, for advocating for girls' education.

The attack on her sparked an outcry from supporters around the world.

She miraculously survived and is now a leading campaigner for girls' education globally as co-founder of the Malala Fund and in 2014, became the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

A film about her life, called ‘He Named Me Malala’, was released recently by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

The film gives an inside glimpse into her extraordinary life – from her close relationship with her father who inspired her love for education, to her impassioned speeches at the UN, to her everyday life with her parents and brothers.

Documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and producers Laurie MacDonald and Walter Parkes show how Malala, her father Zia and her family committed to fighting for education for all girls worldwide.

And Malala took part in a Q+A to mark the documentary’s release:

What was it like having director Davis Guggenheim enter your life to make this film?

In the first meeting we were very confused about how it was going to work, what he would ask, whether he would find some actors to play our roles, and how was he going to tell our past story.

Then, to begin with, he had an interview with us and he brought no camera. He just brought a microphone and we talked and talked. We developed good communication and a way of understanding each other and I realised that I was saying things that I hadn't said before.

Davis has this talent to help you discover your inner self and to help you discover what is in your heart.

He did that very well from the very first interview and that's really what motivated my father and me to continue this journey and to let Davis into this journey of our life, which is to fight for education and for girls' rights to go to school.

He has filmed that over the last two years — my whole journey, my life at home and my life on the trips where I try to build awareness for girls' rights in Jordan, Nigeria and Kenya.

The movie has become the voice of my life journey over the past two years.

Can you convey the emotions you felt when you saw the film for the first time?

What was really great about the film when I saw it for the first time was the animation part, with such artistic creativity combining in my story.

I found it very exciting and I enjoyed looking back into my past, at the life of my father when he was growing up, the life of my mother and how she faced difficulties and how she stopped going to school. Then, to look at my own life and how I was growing up and how close I was to school; school was my home.

Then to see the whole family talking and delivering our story was exciting.

What was not so good was hearing my brothers talk against me [laughs]! Davis had the right to choose what he wanted to put in the film but if it were up to me I'd have cut those things out [laughs]!

The movie was wonderful and I really enjoyed it.

I wish that we will have another movie, He Named Me Malala 2, and then I will talk against my brothers [laughs]!

Overall, I am very grateful to everyone who has worked on this film, helping to support the idea that every child deserves education. This movie is very important to my family.

Have you always been so fearless and calm, or were you worried at certain points when you were living in Pakistan?

I think it is part of human nature to be scared and to feel fear.

When I was in Swat Valley there were times when I was scared. I was scared to go to school because of the fear that someone could throw acid on my face or that the terrorists could flog me for going against what they wanted. There were those times.

But what kept me going was courage, courage that came to me because of the way my father inspired me, speaking out for women's rights and girls' education.

Seeing in my community in the Swat Valley that the terrorists were bombing schools, I knew that there would be no peace and that things wouldn't change if I remained silent.

I felt a responsibility to speak out and to say something and that gave me courage. That's why I have continued with it.

Right now, I am very optimistic. I do ask questions before making any decisions but I am optimistic about the future. I think things will change.

How important is this film for the Muslim world?

Being a Muslim family standing up for education and fighting for peace and women's rights, this movie clearly shows that Islam is a religion of peace and brotherhood.

After seeing the film, people will see how this Muslim family stood up for peace and for education.

And, hopefully, it'll be able to reach every house, in the East and the West, and it will be able to bring the changes that we want to see, not only in bringing education but also showing the importance of peace and tolerance.

Do you hope to return to Swat Valley one day?

I am hoping that we will be able to go Pakistan very soon and I am very excited about that.

I miss my country, having been away for more than three years.

It is very difficult. We came to the UK not by our own choice but through circumstances that forced us to come here. It is hard to live in a situation that is not your own choice.

But I hope that after I finish my studies I will work in Pakistan.

That has been my dream for years, to help my country and to see every child in my country get a good education.

This is where the campaign started. I saw terrorism and I saw girls being denied the right to education.

The journey started in Pakistan.

With terrorism, I think world leaders need to come together and take the threat very seriously because people are suffering. Millions of people have become refugees.

I saw that on my trip to the Lebanon and Jordan on my 18th birthday. I saw innocent children living in camps, being away from their homes, and it is so hard for them. Some of them have been away for three or four years.

It is not easy to live in this situation when you have no hope for home or for school. If world leaders don't focus on this war, then more and more children will become refugees.

How do you cope with all the attention you receive?

It's a very good question.

Right now, it feels like I have two very different lives. One as a girl at home, fighting with my brothers, going to school and living like a normal girl. I have to do homework and exams. I recently did my GCSE exams.

And then also I am another girl who speaks out for education.

It feels like two different lives but the reality is that it is just one person doing this. I am trying my best every day to connect these two people together as part of my life.

What impact has winning the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize had upon your life?

Winning the Prize is such a precious award and I was not expecting it at all. It was such a surprise to win that at the age of 17, when I was still a child.

I felt very honoured as a child receiving the award for standing up for children's rights and education, receiving the award along with Kailash Satyarthi, who has done so much for children's rights.

It gave me strength and more courage to continue the fight.

More than 66 million girls in this world cannot go to school and the Nobel Peace Prize gave me the opportunity to spread this message further across the world and to ask world leaders to focus more on this problem.

Whether I won the award or not, I would have continued to focus on this message. It is part of my life. It's my life mission.

Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?

Hopefully, I will have finished my school and university education and I will be doing great work in Pakistan, helping children to go to school.

I have a strong commitment to my country and I have promised myself that I will help Pakistan to become a better country, that the people will get peace and good quality education.

It is a shame to know that there are children who get no schooling and that there are people with no facilities. I believe my country deserves the opportunity to see progress and development.

Do you feel as though the attack you suffered was part of a larger plan, part of your destiny even?

I started the campaign when I was only about 10 and it was due to the circumstances that I faced.

If there were no terrorists in Swat Valley and I could go to school, then I wouldn't have had to speak out because there would have been no need.

I stood up because there was a need.

Someone needed to stand up, to bring change, to talk about education.

With the incident, I was targeted because I spoke out very openly. Some people were hesitating about saying the word Taliban, but I did not hesitate.

I said that if they're doing these things then why not say they are doing these things.

Even if the incident had not happened I would have continued this campaign and my mission.

It just happened.

I had no idea if the attack was the end of my journey or whether it was a new beginning. It turned out to be a new beginning.

I had to choose. I had been targeted and therefore I could stop. Or I could continue.

I had seen the worst moment in my life and I chose to continue because any fear I had of being killed was gone. I feel as though no one can stop me.

I am very thankful to everyone for their support. That gives me more courage every day.

'He Named Me Malala' is available now on DVD and Digital Download. And £1 from every DVD sold will be donated to The Malala Fund, to help enable girls to complete 12 years of safe, quality education so that they can achieve their potential and be positive change-makers in their families and communities.

Celebrating the wide range of our US sisters

Posted: 10 Mar 2016 06:14 AM PST

A documentary film about the birth of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s.

The film ‘She's Beautiful When She's Angry’ is a provocative and rousing look at the birth of the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s.

It offers a unique focus on local and lesser-known activists, including the Boston authors of 'Our Bodies, Ourselves', the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, and grassroots organisations across the country, using never-seen before archival footage, great music from the period and artful re-enactments.

She's Beautiful depicts the early days of the National Organization for Women (NOW) when ladies wore hats and gloves – and at the same time, young women, frustrated with their second-class status in civil rights and peace groups, started a new movement called women's liberation.

Young women who proclaimed that "the personal is political," and demanded sexual equality in every part of daily life. Featuring interviews with early feminists Kate Millett, Fran Beal, Rita Mae Brown and many others, She's Beautiful When She's Angry shows women fighting back with humour, sometimes with fury – daring to be "bad."

She's Beautiful When She's Angry reveals a wide-reaching movement, with women's rock bands, poetry readings, and "zaps," impromptu protest actions, showing many aspects of the movement: poets and publishers in San Francisco (Susan Griffin and Alta); lesbian activists (Rita Mae Brown and Karla Jay) who made the slur "Lavender Menace" into a term of liberation; Chicago women who started a pre-Roe underground abortion service (Judith Arcana and Heather Booth); and the Boston women who wrote Our Bodies, Ourselves, named by Time Magazine as one of the most important books of the 20th century.

She's Beautiful also shows many strands of early feminism, including the voices of women of colour and struggles over issues of class and lesbian rights; and major themes appear throughout the film: the struggle for freedom and equality, a woman's right to control her own body – in terms of sexuality, health care, and reproductive rights.

These also links to current day issues, showing young women inventing their own forms of feminist action, with "Slut Walks" protesting rape culture in New York, and in Texas protests over the closing of abortion clinics.

The film celebrates the "worker bees" of the women's movement, and collective organising, rather than heroic individuals.

The extraordinary women who appear in the film are often unheralded, even in their own communities – She's Beautiful is a grassroots view of the movement, rather than focusing on the most famous, or the "firsts", and the interviewees display humour, self-criticism and thoughtfulness throughout the film.

She's Beautiful When She's Angry covers the country-wide women's movement in the USA, with emphasis on grassroots organisers in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Washington DC.

All interviews were shot by women DP's, and the film was directed, produced and edited by women.

The film was funded in part by a very successful Kickstarter campaign in November 2012, which raised over USD81,000 from 1231 donors.

Director Mary Dore explains:

She's Beautiful When She's Angry is intended to be informative and provocative, both in style and content.

The title conveys my approach – it’s memorable, and it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. So did the women's movement, and so do today's arguments over women's rights.

This is a very personal film for me; my life was entirely changed by the women’s movement.

While I am a bit younger than the women in the film, I witnessed the power and exhilaration that was created by challenging the most basic ideas of society.

If you were there, you know what I mean – the world turned upside down, or in Ruth Rosen's words, "the world split open."

Coming from a working class family run by a towering (if only in will) matriarch, my grandmother, the idea that women had to work and not rely on men was not news to me.

But like many young women, the other issues that feminism questioned – sexuality, beauty standards, marriage, all that messy stuff – that was terrifying.

I remember being at a meeting and seeing the pamphlet "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" for the first time – and I didn't dare to pick it up.

Fast-forward a few decades.

Having made many historical documentaries, one of the reasons I felt compelled to make this film is that it had not been done before. Astonishingly.

There have been dozens to hundreds of films made on the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, environmental issues, etc. But there have been very few films on the women's movement, and none with the scope of a feature documentary intent on reaching a wide theatrical audience.

For reasons both complex and very simple, the women's movement, arguably the biggest revolution of the 20th century, has been disparaged and ignored.

Somewhat blindly, I decided that I would tackle this story, and get the women's movement the attention it deserved.

I love history, so starting research was the easy part.

That brought me to Sara Evans' 'Personal Politics' and Alice Echols' 'Daring to Be Bad'; both were critical to my understanding the web of politics that drew women to feminism after participating in many of the great movements of the 1960s.

I began writing grants for film funds in the early 1990s, and met with constant rejection; it was very discouraging. As a professional filmmaker and TV producer, there were long hiatuses when I had my children, or worked on paying jobs, and then came back to this project.

In 2000 I filmed the first interviews, with a new partner, Nancy Kennedy, who has edited many award-winning films.

We shot four veteran feminists: Susan Brownmiller, Carol Giardina, Alix Kates Shulman, and very fortunately Ellen Willis, who sadly died a few years later.

In 2010 we finally received our first grant to start production, and we were off!!

In some ways the long haul has been fortuitous. The film is very timely, as debates over sexuality, rape, even birth control are now at a fever pitch. And the more research I did, my grasp of the complexity of the movement evolved as well.

Originally my focus was on the more radical women's liberation movement, my side of the table as it were, and I was fairly indifferent to the history of NOW. However, as I did more research, it became clear that NOW was very radical for its time; on childcare, abortion, divorce – and that their accomplishments were extraordinary.

Fresh memoirs and histories of the movement emerged: Susan Brownmiller's 'In Our Time', Ruth Rosen's 'The World Split Open', Karla Jay's 'Tales of the Lavender Menace', and the very useful collections 'The Feminist Memoir Project', edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Anita Snitow and 'Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement' edited by Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon.

Advice from academics and early feminists Ruth Rosen, Jo Freeman, Sara Evans was immensely helpful, and particular thanks to Amy Kesselman for helping me see the many strands of feminism, and find a path to address the issues of race and class.

From the beginning, my focus was on the very early days of the movement, since that was the story that was least well known, and illustrates the political background and issues that led to the women's movement.

I was frequently told that we were attempting to cover too much, that it should be just a few characters, or one event, or narrowed down.

Perhaps because I had experienced the movement in Boston, I felt that too many of the written narratives centred on New York City, the media capital. So the realisation emerged that this should be a grassroots view of the movement, not focusing on the most famous, or the "firsts".

And that it was about collective organising, not about heroic individuals.

It soon became clear that certain stories could not be told without recreations.

The Lavender Menace was an amazing and important story, which could not be fully told even with the half dozen photos taken by the brilliant photographer Diana Davies.

And the importance of all those early manifestos, position papers, the writing that was formative to the early movement, needed to be conveyed with the passion they were written with – so we chose to film them with staged readings.

Since we wanted to show many different groups, issues, and events, the film was developed to be thematic, rather than strictly chronological. With the great editing talents of Nancy Kennedy and Kate Taverna, and major contributions from editors Ana Crenovich and Michele Chen, the film finally found its form.

That's the simple version of how we made She's Beautiful When She's Angry.

The title comes from a 1960s feminist street theatre performance, filmed by the film collective Newsreel.

Like that play, this film has had many, many contributors – creatively, politically, and financially. This is one of those projects where you have too many people to thank, and too many debts to repay, Dore said in conclusion.

It is not a cheerleading film, it's an investigation into how movements evolve, where they go wrong or right, and problems with diversity and leadership.

Ultimately, this is a film about organising for human rights, and marries the past with what needs to be done today.

24 UK News

Friday, March 11, 2016

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