Sundance Film #9: Enemies of Happiness

Enemies of Happiness
In September 2005, Afghanistan held its first parliamentary elections in 35 years. Among the candidates for 249 assembly seats was Malalai Joya, a courageous, controversial 27-year-old woman who had ignited outrage among hard-liners when she spoke out against corrupt warlords at the Grand Council of tribal elders in 20003. Enemies of Happiness is a relevatory portrait of this extraordinary freedom fighter and the way she won the hearts of voters, as well as a snapshot of life and politics in war-torn Afghanistan.

Amidst vivid, poetic images of Joya's dusty Farah province, the film tracks the final weeks of her campaign, when death threats restrict her movements. but the parade of trusting constituents arriving on her doorstep leaves no doubt that Joya is a popular hero. Among her visitors is a 100-year-old woman who treks two hours to offer loyalty and herbal medicine. King Solomon-style, Joya acts as folk mediator and advocate, adjudicating between a wife and her violent, drug-addicted husband and counseling a family forced to marry off their adolescent daughter to a much older man. Protected by armed guards, Joya heads to poor rural areas to address crowds of women, pledging to be their voice and "expose the enemies of peace, women, and democracy." In the presence of her fierce tenacity, we can imagine the future of an enlightened nation.
(Caroline Libresco, 2007 Sundance Film Festival catalog)

preceded by the short Make a Wish
A young Palestinian girl will do anything it takes to buy a birthday cake.
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Just as the short that preceded Offscreen should have warned me that the coming film would be disturbing and bizarre, the short Make a Wish warned me that the coming feature would be sweet and heartbreaking. Make a Wish showed two little girls trying to buy a birthday cake. What they endure trying to buy the cake is positively post-war Italian in its sadness, and when they come home triumphantly with their cake, their worried-out-of-her-mind mother grabs the older girl by the arm, making her drop the cake. Crying ensues, but at last we see why the cake is so important as the girls and their mother all sing happy birthday around the cake with the lit candle and the oldest girl whispers to the picture of her dead father "Make a wish, papa."

You'd pretty much have to be made of stone not to cry at that.

About Make a Wish the Pirate says: It was very sweet.

My face was still wet when Enemies of Happiness started. Our ticket was for the World Documentary Grand Prize, and although they released the names of all the prize winners at eight o'clock and we were in line for the film at 8:15, nobody knew what film it would be.

Enemies of Happiness starts with footage of the speech that got Malalai Joya banned from the Grand Council two years earlier, then shows her in the present during the few weeks right before the elections. I was really afraid that we'd see her, get attached to her and then watch her gunned down or blown up in front of us, and I was thankful it never happened. In the Q&A after the film, the director said that Joya, whose district is an outlying one in the south of Afghanistan near the Iranian border, has moved to Kabul and is still working hard in parliament for the rights of women and against the institutionalization of the kinds of laws enacted by and for the warlords who have controlled Afghanistan for so long.

The speech she made in 2003 gave Joya a great deal of credibility with her district, and she becomes the neutral third party that many people come to with their problems. We get to see her mediating on behalf of several people, and she comes across as trustworthy even though she never tells anyone "I can solve your problem for you."

In politics, she's very passionate and I worry that she won't heed the advice of one man who told her "you can't chop down a tree with one stroke. You have to take a branch off here and a branch off there and that's how you do it." Joya is all for ridding the country of the warlords who control huge private militias in one fell swoop and her passion has already made her a target. I'm excited to see her working so hard to make a difference, but I hope that she sees that she can make more of a difference as a live politician than as a dead martyr.

The Pirate says: Inspiring. It was a really good documentary of a politician in a difficult circumstance.