Trials, which compel people to tell the truth (or something resembling it), are instant entertainment - not all the time, but often enough. If they weren't, the networks wouldn't be running idiotic parodies of them all day long with Judge Judy and the rest of the Soap Opera Solomons.
Sisters in Law, the new documentary by
Florence Ayisi and
Kim Longinotto, is anything but a parody of justice. Set in and around a courthouse in the town of Kumba, Cameroon, the doc is a
Wiseman-esque portrait of how a woman judge (Beatrice Ntuba) and a woman prosecutor (Vera Ngassa) administer justice in a place where women are beaten and children are abused and raped, usually with impunity. With deadpan concentration, they hear cases that resulted in the first convictions for abuse in 17 years. A young girl of about eleven - "who doesn't even have breasts yet," the judge says incredulously - arrives with a complaint that she's been raped by a neighbor. He denies it, of course, blaming the girl for seducing him, but he ends up confessing. A child of six is brought in covered with welts received at the hands of the woman in whose "care" she was left. "I just beat her for correction," the woman says as she confesses.
Given what could have been made of the crimes that it examines, this is a starkly minimal film. Prosecutor Vera Ngassa and Judge Beatrice Ntuba aren't looking for drama and the presence of the camera and crew don't seem to have had much of an effect on anyone's behavior. The courtroom may be a "theater," but this theater is a space for truth rather than a stage for exaggerated gesture. The film's humor, and there's plenty of it, comes from the sad fact that these defendants are anything but actors. There's nothing funnier than a liar who doesn't know how unconvincing his lies are.
The camera takes it all in. Yet the characterization of the documentary as a "fly on the wall" film, as some critics have described it, isn't entirely accurate, either. While
Sister in Law doesn't have any dramatic camera movement (one critic inexplicably called it "zooming" - what was he watching... or smoking?) and it clearly reflects the Wiseman-like approach of letting the camera roll as events take their course, sometimes glacially, the savvy editing brings a compelling dimension to its story. Reaction shots are as crucial to this film as to any other.
In the office where the prosecutor and judge work, the men (yes, male assistants in this phallocratic country) look on approvingly when witnesses are questioned and judgments are handed down. Somehow I think this is more, much more, than the equivalent of laughing at the boss's jokes. The two women in authority don't mug for the camera, as petty autocrats are known to do in Manhattan as well as Africa, nor do they seem to expect their employees to do so. The reaction shots of the defendants are just as revealing. Whether the accused is an abusive husband or a woman who beats a tiny child, the response to charges is, "But we've always done things this way." Call it tradition, or accepted practice, or hegemony, it hasn't been questioned in an effective way, at least not in Kumba. "What's all the fuss?" the defendants seem to be asking. The judge's assertions that these acts are crimes and that those committing them will be punished bring reactions of incredulity and fatalism. The future, or the fear of the future, is written on the defendants' faces.
This is not some African version of
Judge Judy, as promotional materials for the film have suggested. If your thing is watching a nasty old lady scream in Brooklyn-ese at a teenage mother from Nebraska over an unpaid trailer park fee, stay on your couch and click the remote. This film may be too true for you, and too positive.
Will this pair of modest crusaders in Cameroon change the world?
Sisters in Law makes no great claims in carving out its limited territory. Longinotto and Ayisi have shown us some very small steps and the immeasurable difference they can make in people's lives.
I spoke to Kim Longinotto when she was recently in New York.
What got you to Kumba in Cameroon?
I made a film just a year before in Kenya [
The Day I'll Never Forget], in which 16 girls take their parents to court to keep the parents from circumcising them, and I was taken with the women and girls I met when I was making that film. There was this real sense of people standing up against tradition. I wanted to go back to Africa and make another film about change. One of the main problems I had in Kenya was language. I think there are 240 languages in Kenya. I want to go to a country in Africa where English was quite a common language, just for my own sanity. I met Florence Ayisi. She came to see my film,
Divorce Iranian Style. We went on a research trip together. Kumba, the last stop, was her home town, and I met Vera and Beatrice there, so that was the beginning of the film.
Kenya's a long way from Cameroon.
It may sound quite arbitrary to you, but I'm about to go into Pakistan with a friend of mine who's writing a novel about her dad in Pakistan, and sometimes it's good just to go and see other places, and be curious and discover things. That's how that happened.
Sometimes it's also good to go with someone from the culture, instead of just parachuting in by yourself with a foreign crew.
When we made the film, it was me and an English sound recordist. So, it was a foreign crew parachuting in, really. But I don't see it like that. In
Sisters in Law, you get a sense very much that the women are very happy that we're there, making the film, and it was absolutely like that with
Divorce Iranian Style as well. You're filming people who are outsiders trying to do something different or difficult. The fact that you're also from outside is sometimes a comfort to them.
I don't know if you remember the moment in
Divorce Iranian Style - a woman comes in. We didn't even have a chance to speak to her outside the court. She sort of nods to us, as if to say, "Oh, good - film." She didn't know whether we were from England or anywhere. But the fact that there were women in the court was very exciting to her and made her feel stronger.
Isn't it also another level of accountability?
Yes, it is.
I assume that there were no restrictions on filming in a law court in Cameroon.
We had to get permission to film in the law court. I think there were some things that we got away with because Vera was with us. For example, filming in the prison, we went in with her. I think that it would have been impossible to get permission to film if we'd gone through the official channels.
How did the defendants feel about being filmed. Did you have to get their permission, too?
We had to get everybody's permission. It's interesting. When you're in a court situation, or in a lot of situations, people from both sides feel that they're completely justified. They convince themselves that they're right. For example, Ladi's husband [who has beaten her because she left the house without his permission], when he's saying that, according to the Koran, she shouldn't go out, he feels himself completely justified. He thought that he was the aggrieved person, and he was absolutely sure he was going to win that case. His lawyer, who was a bit of a scoundrel, even laughed, because he knew the case was hopeless. The husband keeps admitting, "I did hit her, but she shouldn't have gone out." The same with the husband of Aminah [who seeks a divorce]. He says, "I did beat her up." They're so convinced that they have these incredible powers that they like having a witness. They quite like being filmed.
Is it a witness for performance instead of a witness for truth?
The rapist of a young girl is fighting for his life, really. If it's theatrical, it's theatrical for the sake of the judges. We're the least interesting thing in the room at that point.
It's a very important and critical moment in their lives. That's when you know that it's between them and the judge and we're not part of the equation. Once the case starts going, they forget about us completely.
What does the camera change, then?
I wouldn't call it the camera, because people are thinking of us being there. The fact that we were there when the only convictions for 18 years happened meant that Aminah felt a little bit of reassurance. She would always say, "Tomorrow I've got a meeting with my family. Will you come?" It gave her just that little bit of encouragement. It must have helped her follow it through. At the last minute before the divorce court, she wasn't going to go. She was absolutely terrified about being sent back, and we said, "No, no, we'll be there with you." In terms of the actual events, whether we were there or not, the same things would have happened, obviously. Vera and Beatrice aren't going to change their sentences, and those whole scenes would have played out the same way, whether we were there or not.
And this outside/inside doesn't have to do with geography, then. It has to do with where you're coming from. It's an emotional thing. We crossed that boundary very quickly with Aminah. In the same way, Vera and Beatrice have crossed over. They're saying, "We're not going to be bribed. We're for justice." When a lawyer comes to her to do a deal, Vera says, "You know I don't negotiate." He's laughing, because he's trying it on, since he's been asked to by his clients. That's very unusual. It's also unusual that Vera goes to prison to bring a prescription for someone she's sent to jail. That would never happen with any of the judges that I've heard of in England.
Vera and Beatrice are the outsiders. They're different. Vera is different in that way she absolutely identifies with the underdog, with weak people who have no power. Often, when people get power, there's a shift when they start identifying with people in power, with the rich, the educated people. But she continues after 18 years to identify with the uneducated and the powerless.
You've said that some 280 of 600 judges in Cameroon are women. Does that change the way justice is administered?
The fact that they are women domesticates the court. It made it possible for Sunita [the young rape victim] to stand up and confront her rapist. The court listened to her and gave her the space. There's a big thing in England at the moment, that so few rape trials get convictions, and so few women who've been raped go through to that phase, just because everything seems to be loaded against women in rape cases. You can see in the film that women can have an impact on the whole system.
Is the problem in England that women won't testify out of fear, out of the expectation that they won't get a conviction after they bring all the evidence?
Because of the adversarial way in which it's done, they become the ones who have to defend their sexual past, in the way that the rapist tried to do with Sunita in
Sisters in Law. He said, "Oh, she asked for money. It was her that provoked it. I said, 'No, no, no,' and then she insisted." There was this whole sense that he was trying to create the story that somehow it was all her fault. Luckily that case was very straightforward. You can tell that a little 11-year-old who was so badly injured made that kind of defense seem ridiculous. But that is the defense that's often used.
We're watching the first convictions in 18 years in the whole of Cameroon. You asked what the effect was of our being there. It can't be so much of a coincidence that we were there for six weeks and we get the very first two convictions. That has to have been somehow part of a whole series of things. We have to have given some sort of extra reason why she [Sunita] was prepared to take it through to the end.
When we showed the film at a screening in South Africa, a man asked afterwards how we could justify showing the face of a little girl who'd been raped. I explained that the whole community knew about it, that she'd gone to hospital, and that she'd gone on with the case and taken it through, and everybody knew about it. After that, about twenty women came forward and were hugging us, saying that they all had been raped and they were so proud of Sunita for standing up. They said, "We're so glad you didn't blur her face and make her into a criminal. We're so glad that she was in the film." It was an important thing for Sunita as well. It was all part of her healing that she stood up.
How much did you shoot in Cameroon?
I shot thirteen hours. It's much less than most people shoot, but I shoot on film, so I have to be disciplined about what I film.
You could obviously make a whole series of films set in that courtroom, films that would open up an even wider perspective on that society.
Yeah. It's the thing of wanting to humanize cultures that are shown in a one-dimensional way. It's really important that people make films about famines and wars, and I support the making of them. But then I think of the Kenyan crew that decided not to film the trial over circumcision in a village because it's not a big enough profile.
Often the really interesting things in societies are the things behind the scenes - families, or the incredible social shifts, and those don't normally get filmed. So we see the extremes, we see the people dying or people fighting. And those are the same things that people within those countries are filming.
In terms of Iran, what we were seeing were the fatwas and the fanatical side of Iran. We weren't seeing ordinary people and ordinary life, things that link us all, like divorce, all the sort of emotional domestic things that we just aren't seeing.
Did Divorce Iranian Style ever show in cinemas in Iran?
No, but everybody's seen it. The woman in the film who's lost her kids - she lives in a very poor part of Tehran, where nobody's got satellite dishes, but everybody in the neighborhood has seen it one way or another. She says that wherever she goes, people ask her if she's gotten her kids back yet. It's extraordinary.
Has Sisters in Law shown in Cameroon? I can't imagine that there are many cinemas there.
No. There isn't even much electricity in Kumba, so it is difficult, although
UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, is planning to translate it into a number of different languages and help us take it around Africa, which is nice.
Did families, or any people who felt threatened by what the film might show, interfere with your filming it?
No. We were really welcomed, actually. We were making a film with women. Part of that meant that some people didn't really take it that seriously. The women themselves absolutely loved us being there and filming. I think that if you feel that you don't have a voice, and you've been marginalized, it's really nice to have a witness.
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