Images of Arabia

Arizona Daily Wildcat photo courtesy of Middle Eastern Film Festival See Divorce Iranian Style and other intriguing films at the Middle Eastern Film Festival.

If you will be stuck in Tucson for spring break, your best escape is the Center for Middle Eastern Studies' Middle Eastern Film Festival at Gallagher Theatre. Beginning today, CMES will show four films on the theme of "Love, Marriage and Divorce," which is probably more excitement than you'd get from a weekend in Rocky Point anyway.

The festival opens with "Divorce Iranian Style," a documentary by British filmmakers Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini. Inspired by Mir-Hosseini's book on a similar theme, "Divorce" explores family law as hashed out in the office of the benevolent Judge Zeldar.

The type of Koranic law administered in Zeldar's courtroom does not favor the cause of a wife seeking divorce. Remarkably, the women who bring their cases to court are not only unaware of the limitations on their rights, they disregard them. The plaintiffs, pouting and scowling from beneath their heavy chadors, employ every possible resource to get what they want from a system that does not protect them

There is feisty, 16-year-old Ziba, who insists that she was tricked into marriage, and demands a divorce from a husband nearly twice her age. Although Ziba's husband consents to marriage, she insists he pay her the traditional "marriage gift" of roughly $10,000, a sum which women are legally entitled to, yet generally give up in exchange for a desired divorce. Undeterred by this reality, Ziba battles with a sort of innocence and entitled optimism absent from the older women in this film.

The most compelling of the cases to come across Zeldar's desk is that of Maryam, a woman who has relinquished custody of her older daughter to remarry for love, and now must return her younger one to the care of her ex-husband. This is mandatory because of the social taboo involved in the family Maryam has made for herself: under the privileges of Koranic law, Maryam's husband could take her daughter as a second wife. Because the child has come of a nearly marriageable age, 7, she must go to her father.

Maryam attempts everything to keep her daughter - begging, lying and attacking her ex-husband. Yet she has apparently not considered that the law cannot be manipulated to serve her, and her slow realization of this is crushing to watch.

The events of the courtroom are enlivened and commented upon by the seasoned, jaded court secretary and her spirited young daughter. One charming scene involves the young girl sitting in Zeldar's desk and role-playing. The audacious spunk of the daughter and the disapproving commentary of her mother are juxtaposed in a way which exemplifies the

varying attitudes of the women in this film.

"Divorce Iranian Style" is fascinating because it runs counter to so many Western preconceptions of Iranian women in particular, and Middle Eastern Women in general. Dressed in an ultra-modest fashion, the women of "Divorce" are assertive, confident and emotional. There is nothing in this film to support ideas of passive, voiceless womanhood. Following their subjects from home to mosque to family court, Mir-Hosseini and Longinotto reveal a portrait of women's lives which is universal in its appeal, however

specific its subject matter.

Also playing in the festival are "Date Wine," from Egypt, and "Bent Familia," which focuses of three young Tunisian women. The last film in the series is "Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land," a documentary exploring mixed marriages between the three major monotheistic religions of the Middle East.