(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Squash player Maria Toorpakai and her family hail from Waziristan, a Pakistani mountain region bordering Afghanistan where the Taliban and various clan leaders have great influence. Maria couldn't play squash when she was little because women in Waziristan are not allowed to play sports. To trick the Taliban, she dressed up as a boy when she was training. But the training was discovered when Maria was 16 years old, which led to the family starting to receive death threats. For the next three years she could not do her favorite sport, and mostly had to stay inside.
Not afraid. At the beginning of the film, we meet Mary in Canada a few years later. She has been discovered by a famous squash player who has become her coach. It makes an impression to hear Mary tell about how much it has cost her to pursue her squash dream, and how uncomfortable it is to still be killed because of her gender. The indications in Waziristan are everywhere and she and the family are not safe there.
War and poverty threaten their foundations, but gender discrimination is also a matter of life and death.
It's been a long time since Maria decided not to be afraid of the Taliban. "Fear is learned," she says, reminding us that people in war zones continue their lives even if everything around them collapses. She herself alternates between living in Canada and with her family in Waziristan and Islamabad. Maria and her family are going to take up the fight against the Taliban in their homes, and they insist that it is not appropriate for them to flee the country for good. Although the Toorpakai family appears tough and stoic, we also gain an insight into their costs and anxieties – and the emotional work needed when challenged -
norms.
Gender identity. Early in the film, Maria describes how, as a little girl, she tricked people into thinking she was a boy – for example, by giving the impression that she was angry and tough. It may seem as if she was almost strategically working to embrace gender norms for how boys should be. But about halfway through the film, we get a closer look at the life Maria lived before the Taliban denied her squash training. Turns out she didn't live as a boy just to be able to play squash – there were other reasons too. She burned all her dresses at one point, cut her hair short and didn't mind that others thought she was of the opposite sex. Towards the end of the movie, she tries out what it feels like to be lured into it today, as she often did as a child.
Through Western glasses it may be tempting to identify a strange theme, but this is never explicitly stated in the film.
Through Western glasses, it may be tempting to identify a strange theme here, but this is never explicitly stated in the film. Maria says that she is currently exploring her own gender
identity, but she does not conclude in any way. Girl Unbound thus avoids part of "our" clichés about skewed themes, and that a Western interpretive framework is threaded down Maria's story. The classic "get-out" stories that many LGBT people have to deal with presuppose that people gradually find their true selves – a kind of truth about what kind of gender category or sexual orientering one belongs. But in the film about Maria, it is
re aspects of her life that are highlighted. You become better acquainted with her, without knowing what happened when in her story. Could it be that precisely the lack of chronology allows Mary's self-presentation to escape our Western culture's usual way of categorizing gender and sexuality?
Surprising twists. The strongest side perhaps Girl Unbound is that you constantly see new aspects of life
the person and her family – relationships they are characterized by. Taliban and Islamists pose a threat to everyone in the neighborhood – but so do American drones who bomb innocent civilians in the "fight against terror." War and poverty threaten the basis of life, but gender discrimination is also a matter of life and death. One of these flows, so to speak, in the other, and we never get a clear answer to what is most dangerous or poses the greatest threat to Mary and her opportunities to create a good life. In this way it becomes clear how different conditions affect each other.
The Taliban poses a threat to everyone in the neighborhood – but so do US drones.
In Canada, Maria trains squash and seems happy. In many ways, this introduction adds to a classic tale of Western superiority: the non-Western protagonist who is oppressed in his home country and finds the freedom to be himself in a Western country. But no final portrait of Mary is drawn, though her interests and visions for life appear. For later in the film, in Waziristan and in Islamabad, it is clear that the family will return home to fight against the Islamists at their home.
At times, it is as if the movie will trick us into thinking that we know what is coming, and then turn around completely and show that the premonitions do not work. For example, Mary does not emerge as a transperson during the film, and she does not pay tribute to Western societies or to distance herself from her own background, as one might expect.
The movie is shown on Oslo / Fusion Festival September 18-24
