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WOW2: November's Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History – 11-24 through 11-30 [1]

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Date: 2022-11-26

November 27, 2021 – Dying to Divorce, a documentary by British director Chloe Fairweather, was selected to represent Britain at the Oscars as its official entry in the Best International Feature Film category. Five years in the making, Dying to Divorce exposes the violent misogyny and dangerous politics behind an epidemic of femicide in Turkey, a country where an astonishing one in three women is subjected to some form of domestic violence. Fairweather was in Turkey filming another project when she met Arzu, who was married off by her father at age 14 to a farmer 10 years her senior. She had children before tensions in the led to her asking for a divorce. Enraged, her husband fired seven shotgun shells at close range into her arms and legs. In the film, s peaking from a prison telephone as he awaits trial, her husband explains he sees his actions as the inevitable consequence of his wife’s behaviour. A determined Fairweather and producer Sinead Kirwan had to conquer a series of challenges, including repeated battles for funds and lengthy delays imposed by a glacial Turkish legal system. “There were lots of times I felt it was not going to be possible to finish the film,” admitted Fairweather, “but that was the good thing about having Sinead there. If one of us was down, the other was offering encouragement. I’m so pleased it’s been chosen as an Academy Award contender by BAFTA, partly because, although it is such an important story, it would have been very risky for it to be made inside Turkey by film-makers there.” At the heart of Fairweather’s documentary is the work of Ipek Bozkurt, a campaigning Turkish lawyer and activist who has guided Arzu, along with many others, through the painful aftermath of appalling injuries, helping them courageously press charges against their husbands. Kubra, another woman featured in the film, had been working for Bloomberg News in London as a television presenter when she met her husband Neptun, who was then working as a producer. At first, her relatives in Turkey, where they returned to live, celebrated the match. Then, two days after the birth of her daughter, her husband viciously hit the back of her head four times during an argument. She suffered a serious hemorrhage which initially left her unable to speak or walk. Her husband claimed her debilitating brain damage was the result of the Caesarian section operation his wife had recently undergone, and nothing to do with the evident trauma to her skull. Deprived permanently of controlled movement and, perhaps most cruelly, of the easy articulacy that had marked her out in her career, it has taken years for Kubra to win the right to see her own daughter again and longer still to get a semblance of justice in the courts. Even now, although her husband has been convicted of the attack, he has not served time in prison. “The unfairness, and the contrast, between the way Kubra’s life was before, and how she is now, and what she has to do to be able to testify in person in court is extraordinary,” said Bozkurt, who campaigns against the legal changes introduced by Recep Erdoğan, Turkey’s authoritarian president. Erdoğan has publicly declared that women and men could not be treated equally “because it goes against the laws of nature,” and that the only job women should have is motherhood. Dying for Divorce had already been praised at several European film festivals, but it was declared by organizers to be too provocative to screen at the annual international film festival staged in Istanbul every year.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/26/2138329/-WOW2-November-s-Trailblazing-Women-and-Events-in-Our-History-11-24-through-11-30

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