Land Gold Women (2011) User Reviews

An all time favorite film

[ratcityfilmsociety · 10/10 · 28 March 2010]

This is one of the most important films that I have ever experienced. The ending is given to us in the first few minutes yet the tension is taut throughout. It is so well made that I did not know that this was a low budget film until I read it somewhere online. The scenes and settings are simple, but at no point does it look like someone was cutting corners in order to save money. So back to the "important" part: This film takes on the issue of so called "honor killings" in Britain, opening up a perspective on an ongoing social tragedy that almost everyone works hard to ignore. This brilliant debut by director and writer Avantika Hari is well made in every way, but there was an element that took this film to the heights of my all time film list. As an American Muslim film geek of Arab descent, I have a particular interest in films about Muslims and Arabs. Islam and Muslims are a tough thing to portray in a film. There is an explanation element that is more or less a necessary component; as well as that simple but seemingly impossible part of just presenting people's perspectives as they are in reality, no spin no judgment. They usually screw up the first part and it just goes downhill from there. In the end, everybody screws up. In my experience Avantika Hari stands alone as the one who didn't. If you have the opportunity to see this rare film, move mountains to do so.

To live and die for

[AvinashPatalay · 23 April 2012]

"Land Gold Women" is a brave attempt on the subject of honour killing that has splashed across the media. Professor of History in University of Birmingham is having mid-life crisis and finds himself at crossroads when his teenage daughter is dating a "kaffir". The subject is bold and potential immense, however gets washed down owing to lack to depth. The patriarch is simply shown yearning for his motherland by brooding over nostalgic songs. His character could have elevated by examining his social network after the onset of 9/11 and religious affinity which gets aggravated by the arrival of his staunch and imposing brother. Om Puri in "East is East" is a perfect example where trivial things make up a complete character which can speak volumes on itself. But that shouldn't steal the thunder from Avantika Hari for her brave effort to undertake a road lesser travelled.

In terms of performances, Narinder Samra stands out with a theatre like performance infusing life into the character of Nazir Ali Khan. Next its Hassani Shapi who gets into the skin of Riyaaz Ali Khan ensuring you will hate the very sight of him. Renu Brindle compliments nicely. Neelam Parmar as the daughter is strictly okay. The two lawyers though do a good job was an unwarranted track that could have been done away with.

PS: The three elements in which tribal honour is preserved are Zameen, Zar (Zevar) and Joru (Aurat) ie. land, gold and women.

In some ways, a true story...

[watford2002 · 9/10 · 31 January 2012]

From Fox news: On January 29, after a ten-week trial and fifteen hours of deliberations, a Canadian jury returned with a verdict of guilty to first degree murder for Mohammed Shafia, 58, Tooba Yahya, 42 (his second wife), and Hamed, 21, their son. They were found guilty of conspiring to and of having murdered Mohammed's first wife, Rona Mohammed Amir, 50, and Tooba Yahya's three daughters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, because they refused to wear hijab, wore Western, sometimes "sexy" clothing, dared to have boyfriends, and, in their father's words, "dishonored" and "betrayed" both "their family and Islam."

The short paragraph above is from a news story. I read it by some coincidence just before I saw "Land Gold Women". This film, as far as I know is fiction. However, it presents a story of an Indian-English family in just such a situation. The daughter has grown up in England and is a bright girl who wants to go to university. She dresses in jeans, doesn't cover her head, and secretly even has a non-Indian English boyfriend. Her uncle arrives from India with a proposal for an arranged marriage which would take her back to India to become the wife of a man she has never met. When she defies her family and refuses, then runs away to the English boyfriend, the consequences escalate to an climax which no one wants but which no one finds themselves able or willing to stop.

A great strength of this film is that it presents the characters and the situation in which they find themselves in a way that makes them all real, believable, and understandable. We know what happened almost from the very beginning. What the film does is make us understand why it happened, what the people involved thought and felt, and how the traditional views of a father towards his family and culture and the modern western perspective of his daughter created a chasm that even years of western life and a loving family relationship was unable to bridge.

This is one of the best films I have seen this year, perhaps one of the best ever. By the end, I felt like the characters were people I knew. Early in the film, the father and daughter find themselves discussing the play "Antigone", another story about a father and daughter where the conflict between the father's authority and perceived responsibilities clashed with what his daughter felt compelled to do, also with tragic consequences.

As I watched this film, my thoughts kept returning to the Fox News story, and I almost felt that I was experiencing the members of that real family demanding from each other agreement to and acceptance of choices which the others found impossible, and with ultimately the same consequences.