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Hardship, injustice and abuse – these are still plights faced by many women in regions around the world. But one woman has stood up to them all and made it her life mission to document them down on film.
Meet Khadija Al-Salami, Yemen’s first and only female filmmaker.
In Singapore during the recent Film Festival, Khadija revealed that her own dark past has propelled her towards this path. She said her latest work, Amina, is parallel to her childhood experience.
The film is a chilling documentary which reveals the societal and legal injustice faced by Yemeni women.
Its main character, Amina al-Tuhaif, who at 11 years old was married to a man many years her senior, was found guilty of murdering her husband at age 14, and was sentenced to death.
After being raped by a prison guard while awaiting execution, she was found to be pregnant and was allowed another three years to breastfeed the child before completing her sentence.
After reading about her plight in the papers, Khadija paid visits to Amina’s prison and conducted interviews, with the intention of making Amina’s story into film.
Through the interview sessions, she found out that Amina had been framed for murder and tried without proper legal representation.
Apart from making her story known to the world through the documentary, Khadija also took upon herself to fight for Amina’s case.
The producer-director said Amina’s story mirrors her life because she too was forced into an early marriage at the age of 11 against her consent, and was raped by her husband. But unlike Amina, Khadija was able to secure a divorce with the help of her mother.
The headstrong filmmaker picked herself up and continued attending school while struggling to realise her dream of filmmaking by working part time in a local television station.
"What forced me to continue going to school was because I wanted to be independent, and for me, education is the key to success," she said.
"That's the only way to take destiny into my hands. I saw all the injustice around me and I saw what my mom and my grandma had to go through, and I don’t want to become like them."
She later went on to finish school in the United States with a Master’s degree in Communications. She currently works as the Press and Cultural Counsellor for the Yemeni Information Centre at the Embassy of Yemen in Paris.
According to Khadija, years of film making has helped her understand why women are treated with injustice in her homeland. But she is also seeing a positive change in the treatment of women in Yemen in recent years.
"(Making films about women) helped me to see why we had such tradition and why my parents reacted the way they did. And I saw that it was not their fault as they were ignorant.
"Yemen has been isolated for so many centuries and after the revolution, the state decided to build schools for girls, but it was still difficult for the families to let their daughters go to school because it was new and unknown to them and they thought it might be dangerous.
"So it took time for them to understand school is important for both boys and girls. So now you see a big change - we have two women ministers in the government and we have women in the parliament. You can see evolution and progress."
She is married to an American, Charles Hoots, but said she returns to her hometown to educate women on creating a better life for themselves.
"Now my duty is to go back and try to teach them," she said. "See what I've been through... I used to be the worst example for girls, but now they see that the outcome is positive, and everybody is encouraging their daughters to become like me."
- CNA/yb
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