QUEST FOR HONOR Screening

When:

March 31, 2010

About the Event:

On March 31st, The University of Texas Documentary Center and Screen Door Film will present a special free screening of the Sundance documentary QUEST FOR HONOR, directed by Texas-based filmmaker Mary Ann Smothers Bruni. The film will screen at Studio 4D in the CMB Building on the campus of UT at 7 PM.

Khotan Harmon (KOOP Radio's Idea Lounge) will host our post-screening panel discussion, which will include:
Mary Ann Smothers Bruni - director of Quest for Honor
Tarek Elariss - Asst. Prof of Middle Easter Studies, University of Texas
Hina Azam - Asst. Prof of Middle Easter Studies, University of Texas

Wednesday, March 31st
7:00 P.M.
Studio 4D, CMB Building, 4th floor
(big black building at the corner of Guadalupe and Dean Keeton)
UT Campus
2501 Whitis
Austin, TX 78705

"We were raised to believe in resistance, persistence, and confrontation. That's why I know I can handle anything." So says one of the women in Quest for Honor, a searing and necessary documentary about the still-prevalent practice of honor killings in the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq. Kurds number more than 26 million and are believed to be the largest ethnic group in the world without their own country. Despite much progress politically and economically, honor killings are routinely cited as the major human-rights violation among Kurds. Since 1991, statistics suggest that more than 12,000 women, mostly between 13 and 18, have met a gruesome death at the hands of relatives, usually the men of the family, who are convinced the victim has impugned the family's honor. The film centers on cases taken up by the Women's Media and Education Center in Sulaimaniyah, Kurdish Iraq.

Texas-based photographer and author Mary Ann Smothers Bruni's film marks her evolution from still photographer to filmmaker. While the deaths themselves are shocking in their sheer brutality, perhaps more striking is the ease with which the men involved in the killings speak about their unforgiving attitudes toward the victims. Deeply disturbing, yet profoundly hopeful, in its belief that change in centuries-old attitudes is possible, Quest for Honor asks us to imagine a day when women everywhere can live in honor, and not fear for their lives.