Among the many reasons why the True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri’s annual celebration of the documentary form, is my favorite festival to attend is that it highlights fresh (and frequently side-lined) perspectives. The three films I’ve written about below— Writing Hawa, Requiem for a Tribe, and A Want in Her— all swirl around topics of particular interest to me: female filmmakers, women overcoming social, cultural, and familial obstacles to fulfill their goals, and (in the case of two films) daughters turning their cameras on their mothers.
“This year, I want to do something and see what happens.”
Director Najiba Noori turns her camera on her mother, Hawa, in debut feature Writing Hawa. Spanning five years, her film is an intimate portrait of three generations of Hazara women fighting to free themselves from oppressive patriarchal traditions. Noori finds her focal point in Hawa, who was forced into marriage with a man 30 years her senior when she was only 13 years old. Now 52 years old and all her own children grown, she begins to take control of her life for the first time. She opens her own textile business, where she collects traditional Hazara embroidery and transforms the delicate fabric into modern dresses. She learns to read and write, often with the help of her young grandsons.
The latter scenes, in which the kids turn teacher on their grandparent (even grading her homework), are played with a light, almost comic, touch, but they also serve as a potent reminder of how Afghan women have traditionally been denied the rights to an education that have been afforded to men. Noori also wraps into this Hawa’s 12-year-old granddaughter Zahra, who was taken to live with her father after her mother divorced him when she was only two, and is just returning to the family for the first time in an effort to escape from under his abusive thumb. She also begins to learn along with Hawa, but both of their newfound emancipation is snatched away when the Taliban takes over Afghanistan. Zahra is forced to return to her father, where the prospect of being married off to a much older man— just as Hawa was— is just around the corner. Najiba flees to France, leaving her brother Rasul (credited as co-director) to continue filming back home. And Hawa’s business and education may not be able to continue.
Writing Hawa is fiercely political (Noori, in her voiceover, at one point turns the blame for their current plight on American interference in the Afghan government, and her brother is attacked while filming), but its anger remains simmering as opposed to explosive. Rather than focusing on her own displacement and forced migration (although that is certainly an issue the film could have touched on more), Hawa’s kindness (taking in Zahra when her daughter is unable to care for her on top of her other family, for instance) and determination serve as a compassionate through line. She’s frank as well, and with her daughter behind the camera you get the sense that Noori is learning as much about her mother through this project as the viewer. She asks Hawa, at one point, if she’s ever actually fallen in love, and she reveals that there was a point when she would have run off with her husband’s cousin. It’s a moving scene, no less because it reads not so much as regret for the past, but a reason to remain resilient to pave a path to a better future for Afghan women— and herself.
If Writing Hawa focused on upending patriarchal practices, then Requiem for a Tribe illustrates how a similar system works to push women out of traditions they hold dear. Such is the case with Hajar, a 55-year-old member of the Bakhtiari, a nomadic tribe largely situationed in southwestern Iran. Hajar finds freedom in the mobile lifestyle and herding her sheep, but her older, passive husband and grown sons prefer to see her move to the city and live a peaceful life.
Director Marjan Khosravi’s (herself from the Bakhtiari tribe) first feature weaves footage captured of Haja at home and traveling with her sheep (a staggeringly gorgeous array of landscapes are peppered throughout the film, from snow-capped mountains to rocky plains sparsely dotted with trees) with clips from People of the Wind, a visceral 1976 documentary by Anthony Howarth that follows the Bakhtiari on their treacherous annual eight week migration over the mountains to reach summer pastures. The editing is perhaps a bit too seamless— Requiem for a Tribe doesn’t provide context for the source of these clips— but there’s a stark contrast drawn between the relentlessly violent methods employed by the male herders in People of the Wind versus the firm yet caring techniques used by Haja, who at one point pauses to help a sheep she spots sporting a broken leg.
Haja is no pushover, however— far from it. She’s a woman with agency, as seen in her forceful conversations with her family, her devotion to her herd, and even her teasing interactions with her husband, who she says became engaged to many other women while waiting for her to grow up, even though he was promised to her. She doesn’t take her male family members’ heartless efforts to force her into a life she doesn’t want to lead laying down, but her devastation and relative powerlessness against a system constructed to oppress her, plus the encroaching modernity that’s rapidly erasing her way of life (Haja calls out one of her sons for selling her sheep to buy a new car) is palpable. This way, Requiem for a Tribe creates a dialogue between the past and present that is as much a celebration of a vanishing way of life as it is a scathing indictment of the patriarchal traditions.
Irish director Myrid Carten has been filming since she received her first video camera at the age of ten. Her old movies depict her friends, family members, and even herself acting out everything from soap opera-esque dramas to Top Model spoofs. She’s still constantly filming, to the annoyance of her family members. The footage she’s capturing now may possess a more mature edge, as she moves about her now-derelict childhood home and struggles to bridge the communication gap when conversing with her addict family members, but Carten’s debut feature, A Want in Her, wastes no time proving that the past is in constant conversation with the present.
Initially intended to dig into the aftermath of her grandmother’s passing, Carten’s project took a turn toward the present day following her mother Nuala’s downward spiral into alcoholism and eventual disappearance. Carten herself remains behind the camera for the bulk of the film, but we still feel the depth of vulnerability, hurt, guilt, and above all else, love, that goes both ways in her one-on-one conversations with her mother. Carten portrays Nuala with copious amounts of empathy, subtly working to unveil the circumstances that led her to such a low point as opposed to foisting blame on her, while allowing her sense of humor to pierce through the regret. Carten’s inclusion of footage she shot of her mother drunk on a city bench doesn’t read as manipulative or sensational, thanks to how Carten frames it: opening her film with a shot of the empty bench while describing the incident, and later using it as method of apologizing to her mom for her own missteps.
There’s something reminiscent of the work of Agnès Varda in how Carten also often moves the filmmaking process to the front of the camera. The repetitious rhythm of the scenes she stages with her mom— prompting her to try to hitch a ride, or approach a car window at just the right angle to capture her reflection— recalls what Varda enacted with her own family in Uncle Yanco, although these sequences in A Want in Her lack a tangible connection to the rest of the narrative. The most effective of these scenes is when Carten herself finally steps in front of the camera, gradually melding her voice with that of her mother’s, merging the struggles of mother and daughter into one. Alcoholism affects the family members of the addict as much as it does the addict themselves, and that this has always been a staple in Carten’s life is reflected in her old childhood movies, in which children act out scenes of drinking and smoking and domestic abuse that in a perfect world they should never be exposed to.
Writing Hawa, Requiem for a Tribe, and A Want in Her screened at the 2025 True/False Film Festival.
Katie at the Movies 