***½/****
directed by Kim Longinotto
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The co-director of Divorce Iranian Style is back with this intelligent and powerful documentary on female genital mutilation in Kenya. Not only does it show, in a chilling centrepiece sequence, the immediate and excruciating pain it causes the young girls subjected to the practice (as well as the health consequences of dirty instruments and heavy stitching), but it also explores the cultural mechanisms that ensure that people, even women, will continue it. The ears burn at hearing tribal leaders offer their explanations of the logic in its implementation, as well as at the older women who encourage girls to not be "dirty" and submit. One gets a sense of how deeply entrenched is this particular rite of passage, and how difficult it is to get traditionalists to part with it. But the film's second purpose is to show the ways that it is being fought and the people who are fighting it. Various social outreach programs, including a school for runaway girls fleeing their parents' wishes, are explored, and we see the efforts of various medical professionals and social workers trying to wean people off the practice, culminating in a landmark court case where a girl sued and won the right not to be another victim. Longinotto's camera records all of this without punctuation and quotation marks, letting her subjects' own words hang them and letting the actions of individuals speak for themselves, resulting in a provocative film of great effect.
