Middle East Art Fusion

|* cinema. Chasing the Freedom. 2004.

IMDB link about the movie
Directed by Don McBrearty
Written by Barbara Samuels

I surely enjoyed watching this movie and had tons of my questions answered. This movie (more correctly, TV series) was based on a true story of an Afghan woman seeking asylum in the US before the September tragedy. An ambitious and busy lawyer (Juliette Lewis) has to take a pro bono asylum case of Meena (Layla Alizada), who was teaching students in Afghanistan despite the ban of Taliban. Meena has no documents. She cannot prove who she is, because the only person who can identify her is her brother. And contacting him means putting his and his wife's lives in great danger.

Before watching this movie, I didn't understand, why refugees don't have any documentation when they come to another country. The problem is that they leave their countries with fake IDs, passports or hidding. If they get caught when they try cross the border to get out and any real document is found, they are stopped and most probably put to prison or worse. When they arrive to another country, they through out the fake documents and are left totally 'armless' in front of the court system.

Before they get the asylum, which allows to stay in the country and get the status of refugee, they are 'detained' in a brusque INS center like prisoners. This woman had excaped from the terror of the tyrany regime and had to live one year (!) under psychological attack and pressure already in the free country of the U.S. I don't want to judge the fairness of the U.S. legal system in this case. But this movie openes the eyes for those, who live and don't ever think about the cruelties happenning in our world nowadays.

In the beginning the lawyer was not willing to put a lot of effort into the case, and she was asking a lot of questions. I can say, most of them were exactly my questions. Even if I heard about Taliban, I couldn't imagine all the horror. There is a good episode when the lawyer goes to Organisation for the Rigths of Women in Afghanistan. She asks about Taliban and the woman in charge says something like "Yes, there is oppression, tyrany and discrimination. People are executed on the stadium to make a show out of it. No freedom of speech, no freedom at all. And yes, nobody speaks about it so much, as nobody cares".

posted by Aleksandra Birjukova @ 18.11.05