Indie Filmmaking in Remote Areas & Communities

Host Tara Jabbari has a conversation with Catherine Haigh and Hannah Congdon to explore the journey of creating their documentary, Women Behind the Wheel, which focuses on women's empowerment in remote communities. They highlight the importance of research, language, cultural challenges, and community support as they share their experiences connecting with local women, the complexities of gender roles, and the impact of social media in their research. They also address serious issues like bridal kidnapping and the nuances of feminism in different cultural contexts, emphasizing the need for small, incremental changes to foster empowerment and support local initiatives.

Learn more about Women Behind the Wheel here: https://catandhan.wixsite.com/womenbehindthewheel
and https://www.instagram.com/women.behind.the.wheel/

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Transcript

00:01 - Guest 1 (Guest)
Quiet on the set, all together Ready set action. 

00:10 - VO (Host)
Welcome to Media Maker Spotlight from Women in Film and Video in Washington DC. We bring you conversations with industry professionals for behind-the-screens insight and inspiration. 

00:24 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Welcome to another episode of Media Maker Spotlight. I'm your host for this one, patera Jabari, and today we have two very special guests that I can't wait to get started with. Kat Haig has a passion of anthropology and ethnographic research. She specialized in women's health during her time at university. Hannah Cogden is a freelance filmmaker and TV producer whose work focuses on gender politics and mental health. 

00:48
They met at university and decided to make a documentary road trip across Central Asia's Pamir Highway, the second highest international road on earth, with just a rented car themselves and some cameras. They went across Kyrgyzstan, uzbekistan and Tajikistan, speaking to women along the way, learning all the ways that feminism exists in all shapes and sizes and how even the smallest changes can amount to a quiet revolution. The result was their award-winning documentary Women Behind the Wheel. They had a sold-out premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival and had a unique screening campaign over the years since its 2022 release. Kat Hannah, welcome to Media Maker Spotlight. Thank you for having us. So a little bit, I wanted to hear a little bit of your background on how you guys we know you met in university, but how did you guys? We know you met in university, but how did you guys also know we can work together and just like tell great stories, like not drive each other crazy. 

01:53 - Guest 1 (Guest)
I mean you probably do, do you? 

01:55 - Guest 2 (Guest)
want to go first. 

01:56 - Guest 1 (Guest)
Um, so you're right, we met at university in our first year actually playing sports. Uh, we were on the same lacrosse team, which for any listeners in the states they might know the sports, so I guess we knew that we could play together on a team. Hannah knew she had a passion for film and I knew that I had a real interest in kind of women's rights and women's issues. So it was after university. 

02:14
The concept for the film initially started from a point of curiosity. We were really intrigued by these countries Uzbekistan, tajikistan, kyrgyzstan that not many people know about, let alone travel to as kind of solo females. So that sparked kind of something in us and we started to do a bit more research. And it was in that research that we came across some really interesting stories of women doing quite incredible things to empower themselves against the backdrop of a Soviet state that's slowly becoming more and more Islamic. We knew we wanted to investigate it a bit more, and that's when we then discovered the Pamir Highway, this road, and decided why don't we give it a go to drive it and document our experiences as two women doing this feat, but, more importantly, use our journey to meet with local women and hear their stories, but it was very much learning on the job. 

03:05 - Guest 2 (Guest)
We definitely did work together really well as a team, but I would say we were on the road for kind of three to four months and it took us definitely like the first few weeks to really get into our groove of how we work together, film together, interview together yeah, we're quite different people so it kind of took yeah, it took a bit of time sort of actually just fall into the things that you know Kat naturally does and I naturally do, and and actually once we got into that, that works really well and we've um kind of loved doing that over the last few years, because there are really obvious things that are more my thing and more her thing and actually it kind of gels together quite well. 

03:36 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
I mean they really that's. The hard part is to not just have the idea and kind of get it funded, which we'll get to, but also to find the partner or the team, and in this case it was really just you two. I don't know if you ever watched the Long Way Round, Long Way Down, Long Way Up, the Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman with their motorcycles. 

04:02 - Guest 1 (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. 

04:04 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Yeah, with their motorcycles, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah it where they just it was them. And then they had a third cameraman to kind of capture the all the things that they've worked on and they worked with unicef. Did you guys do any research of anything similar to what that was like or how you guys wanted to kind of capture things? 

04:25 - Guest 1 (Guest)
Good question. 

04:25
We definitely debated the idea of having a cameraman in addition to me and Hannah on the road and we toyed with that idea a lot and there's a number of reasons why we decided it would be better just for it to be us kind of filming ourselves. 

04:38
Firstly, there's the kind of added cost of bringing somebody else on board and when we first started off with this concept we were really trying to pitch for just initial funding to kind of get camera equipment, let alone a camera person. But then we felt it would really change the dynamic. I think part of the beauty of the film is that it genuinely is just us as two young women taking this trip and being invited into these women's houses and kind of asking them to open up. And we felt that having a third, a camera, a cameraman, might have changed that dynamic and maybe made it harder for the women to open up and feel comfortable with us filming them, which was already quite a controversial thing to be doing in some of these small villages, you know we were 22 when we were doing this, so we're sort of turning up with our, with our pretty small camera and both of us very much learning on the job. 

05:24 - Guest 2 (Guest)
I think we were pretty unintimidating for a lot of the women to speak to, as Kat said, in an environment where most of the women we spoke to were, I think, relatively suspicious of having a camera shoved in their face. I think the fact that we were young, the fact that we were sort of quite gentle with them and we generally got to know them over a longer period of time and we stayed with them, I think that really changed the kind of content that we got and the stories that we uncovered and that, just yeah, wouldn't really have been possible with a sort of third camera person following us around. 

05:55 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
I was going to say it might have also helped you with sometimes dealing with some of the men too, because then they're like, oh, it's just bunch of girls. 

06:06 - Guest 1 (Guest)
That might have helped, you know, like you know what, despite wanting to, obviously being, you know, people who are interested in feminism and and one of these, right, we definitely did play into that at moments, um, because it did help us out. 

06:19
I mean, we got stopped along the road by the police quite a few times because sometimes we were speeding, but also just for routine stops. They would maybe be asking for bribes, but when they saw two women behind the wheel they were pretty gobs backed and most of the time tried to help us out or give us directions and were very chatty and we probably did not get treated at all how maybe local women driving might. So I wouldn't say our experience as a representative, but we certainly played into that at times, the kind of element that we are not very intimidating up to no good women. But at moments we did feel like we had to kind of hide the camera crew a little bit. In Uzbekistan in particular, there's quite a kind of conservative attitude towards journalism. Freedom of the press hasn't really been a thing for that long and I do wonder if we had been two kind of male filmmakers, whether we would have found it more difficult to do what we did. 

07:09 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
And why did you guys decide on having more of a camera and not just using like smartphones? 

07:15 - Guest 2 (Guest)
So no, we never, like at the time, we never even talked about doing it on smartphones. You know, not that it was that long ago, but we did shoot this in 2018. And and, like, I actually just don't think that the camera quality and sound quality and things on iPhones were as good then as they are now, and we wanted it to sort of you know, within the confines of the budget that we had and the equipment that we could get, we wanted it to be cinematic. You know, some of the landscapes that we were traveling through were some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen and also very much give you that sense of place which is a context for the women's rights movements. Within them, we're looking at sometimes quite small women's rights movements in a really remote area, and so we really wanted to get that across visually, and I'm just not totally convinced we could have done that in a 2018 episode. 

08:04 - Guest 1 (Guest)
Yeah, we didn't want it to be too kind of vox poppy. I think we wanted to try and get into the depths of some of the stories and that was, I guess, a stylistic thing that we probably didn't consciously make the decision of, but it definitely evolved as we were doing it. And another stylistic thing that I was going to mention is we debated a bit on how much we should engage with the camera. Do we talk directly to? 

08:21 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
it, do we actively present. 

08:25 - Guest 1 (Guest)
Um, we went with a kind of softer approach in the end, which is what we felt a bit more comfortable doing versus kind of talking and presenting directly to the camera. So you'll see, throughout the film we kind of narrate our journey mostly through our conversations on the road. So we were traveling between locations. We had a gopro that was kind of filming our each and every word, which was clearly a joy for our editor to pick through, but it meant that it kind of captures these quite organic conversations that narrate our journey. And then at the end in the kind of edit, we added a bit of voiceover over the top to just kind of tease out the details. 

08:56 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
That was the other question I had was when you started the narration script, how did that process start? Did the editor choose a sort of rough draft and then you guys look through it and write it, and then did you guys both, uh, record the whole script or did you guys decide, okay, kat's gonna do this part, hannah's gonna do this part. 

09:20 - Guest 2 (Guest)
Yeah, I'm trying to the process. So I think the first step we did was actually just cutting the whole film with um, no script at all, there's no voiceover. So we did like a paper edit and our really brilliant editor, anna, did an assembly and then, once we've done that, you could kind of see where the gaps were. You were like, well, this doesn't really make sense unless we explain xyz, um, and so we kind of started to weave in the script into that assembly. It was more a kind of as we go thing and and the script kept changing right up until the last minute. 

09:53
I think absolutely two separate voice recording sessions and then, I think, a lot of in terms of choosing between the two of us. There were women that, like one of us had connected to or the story resonated more with one of us than the other. There were sort of things that felt more naturally like a Hannah line or a Kat line, and so, again, a bit like when you're asking about how we work together, I think the voiceover was a bit the same. You know it was like, well, this feels comfortable in my voice, this was a thing that I noticed, or this was a thing that Kat noticed. So we very much tried to make the voiceover as far as we sort of could from a kind of voice of God. You know, we're telling you what's what voiceover, and very much a dialogue and something that is helping you see something through our eyes. The voiceover isn't really intended to be like. This is what's what and we know everything about. You know women's rights in this region, which obviously we don't. 

10:44 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
So the way that I kind of heard about you guys is I do remember Years ago hearing about Women Behind the Wheel, but I wasn't able to kind of find it and see it. It was kind of like in community centers or libraries or schools and stuff like that. And I went to in Venice about how to find funding and distribution, particularly for documentaries. And he is one of your main funders and distributors and he and I was like, oh my God, I remember this and stuff like that, but could you by share because I learned from him how did you guys actually get the process of funding such a unique story and documentary project? 

11:39 - Guest 1 (Guest)
I mean it was tricky. It was probably one of the hardest aspects of making this film and we were really lucky to have been put in touch with Christo quite early on in the process, after we'd come back from filming it. So we really kind of went out and took a punt on the filming and I'll talk a bit about how we fundraised for that in a moment. But having been put in touch with Christo, he's really an expert in this field, he's one of our exec producers and his production company, dartmouth Film, were keen to come on board and they gave us a lot of advice about how to fundraise. We had already had a bit of experience doing some crowdfunding and that's what we did to raise funds for the camera equipment and the car rental, to kind of fund the actual production of the trip. 

12:16
And to do that we kind of produced our own little teaser video where we went out and did some driving, I think in the Yorkshire Dales in the north of England, try and give a bit of a flavor of what the film should be about. And I think we discovered this video quite recently and it was completely cringy to watch again. But it kind of served the purpose to tell people this is what we're trying to do, this is the tone of voice we want, and luckily people were generous enough to give some funding and then we could go film it. And then when we came back, we managed to get Anna, our amazing editor, on board quite early on and she cut like a great sizzle reel for it. And it was from that we started to kind of reach out and we applied to I don't know Hannah, like every grant and fund under the sun. 

12:51 - Guest 2 (Guest)
It was a real slog it was a lot of ups and downs. I mean like when, when things did work out, it felt like the best thing in the world. But we had like an excel spreadsheet of every single fund that we could find and it was just really, really tough. There were so many things that just were unbelievably competitive to get um, and yeah, that was a bit of a slog, I think the gems we managed to find came from people really taking a chance on us as two kind of unknown first time female filmmakers. 

13:17 - Guest 1 (Guest)
We applied to Edinburgh Film Festival. They had a work progress pitch so we applied for the concept and we got a little bit of funding off the back of that. So it was pretty piecemeal and we did run out of funding kind of towards the end of post-production, which meant we had to pause for a while and we had to set up another crowdfund, which I don't think either of us felt that comfortable doing it. It's a really tough gig crowdfunding. You have to really ask people and beg and it feels a bit degrading at times. But luckily people came through again and we were able to just about get the kind of budget that we needed to finish the film off to the quality that we wanted. We wanted it so that we could do a kind of cinema release for that. 

13:54 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
And then it got into one of the biggest film festivals, edinburgh, and that's where you had your premiere and two sold-out screenings, and was that with Dartmouth Films' help and guidance and a couple other sponsors? 

14:08 - Guest 2 (Guest)
Yeah, I mean in part, we obviously had the relationship with Edinburgh Film Festival so we'd won their work in progress pitch I think. I think it was two years before it premiered at the film festival. So we kind of stayed in touch with them and they sort of asked you know, when's the film going to be finished? So I think it actually was a lot to do with just with the relationship with them and them having really backed the film from quite an early stage as well, and then from that it's kind of. 

14:28 - Guest 1 (Guest)
The film festival circuit is a hard thing because you have to pay a submission fee for lots of them and you've got to be choiceful about where you submit because you don't want to fly through your budget but you also want to be punchy enough that you get some of the bigger ones. 

14:39
But we started to get a film that human rights film festivals were quite interested in the film. So we then got selected for a human rights film festival in Budapest in Hungary and the One World Festival in Prague, which was, I think, one of the best experiences for us. They had done an amazing job of kind of building an audience and our first screening there was to about 300 people and we were completely gobsmacked a really, really engaged audience with the Q&A at the end and we did do a lot of Q&As after pretty much all of our cinema screenings in the UK. We found it was a good kind of add something a little bit special to help the cinema offer it and add it into their schedule and and we got a lot back from it as well. 

15:14 - Guest 2 (Guest)
Yeah, I think that was actually one of the most rewarding things. You know, like you plug away a film for almost four years more than four years, you know most of the time just the two of us and our editor. And then actually the moment where you know we were filling cinemas in areas where we literally didn't know a single person and you know they were having to cut people off on Q&As because there were so many people that wanted to ask questions and people that resonated with stuff in the film that you really wouldn't have expected, like I mean, I remember a guy in Belfast who was like a sort of you know leather jacket wearing biker, who was talking about how he saw parallels between women's rights movement in Ireland and some of the stories that he had on screen. So yeah, it was really wonderful finding that audience and finding an audience that was so engaged in the subject matter of the film as well. 

16:04 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
It was also a unique way of kind of distributing it, because it was also it's still kind of on the website. Where you're like you can do it in your own community as well kind of thing. It wasn't just like we have to put it on a certain amount of theater screens and stuff like that. So whose idea was that? I think that's kind of new too, to like offer your film or your doc to communities as long as they organize it. 

16:33 - Guest 1 (Guest)
I think, given the ethos of the film and how we got there and it was really quite grassroots getting the funding and it was our baby for such a long time I think we never wanted to restrict who could watch it, certainly not on financial grounds. So if anybody reaches out and wants to watch film or wants to screen it at their school community center, we would never want financing to be an issue, to be a blocker. And the cinema release was not really a commercial exercise. Um it's. It's really hard to kind of make money out of those sorts of tours. For us it was really about trying to get it in front of as many interested people as possible and we did a lot of the contacting cinemas, the sending of the dcp, a lot of the work behind the scenes ourselves, and it paid dividends. I don't know if you've got anything to add, Anne. 

17:18 - Guest 2 (Guest)
Yeah, we didn't set out for this to be a commercial thing and it wasn't ever really a commercial thing, but it was kind of extraordinary that we sold out pretty much every single seat in almost every single screening. So it does show that there are audiences out there. It's just as a mammoth task. I trying to to connect with them and we ended up having a sort of relatively like flexible understanding with darkness where, whereby you know if, if smaller organizations get, I mean still to this day, you know, like the last few weeks we've had people reaching out saying we want to schedule the film for international women's day next year and um, and sometimes they're charities and sometimes they're small arts organizations and um, yeah, so it's kind of carried on in that quite flexible thing yeah, you guys pick a subject that is timeless and we'll get to wait. 

18:03
I could talk to you guys for hours about this but one of the. 

18:06 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
The other thing, before I get into some of the aspects that are discussed um in the doc is a music licensing. I was constantly shazamming. 

18:16 - Guest 2 (Guest)
I was like oh, I like this song. 

18:19 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
And you guys have them clearly from the different countries that you were visiting, as well as other countries, because my family's from Iran, so there's Persian dialect. Is it Uzbekistan? Yeah, it was an. Uzbek singer they kind of speak it like a version of Persian and all that. So I was like I heard that I understood that, and then there's Russian dialects and things like that. So how did you guys get some of the music and the licensing to use? 

18:47 - Guest 1 (Guest)
that. I'm so glad you said that, because the music was something that we did put a lot of love into. We worked with an amazing composer called Holly who brought in a lot of these themes themes we really wanted to reflect some of the kind of local sounds and tones. And we got put in touch with a composer from the region who was living in london called millad, and he played a lot of the local instruments um, I think the tabra was one of them like the local kind of guitar and the drum, and he recorded some samples for us which Holly could then weave into some of these tracks. 

19:16
So she then built out the score you know, bespoke for the film, and then you'll see or you'll hear. Interspersed amongst that there are a few kind of commercial tracks as well, and one of them is from an Uzbek singer who we reached out to and asked you know, do we have permission to use her music? And she said yes, very kindly. And then there is one more commercial track in there from a singer called Aurora, who you might have heard, and we went through the kind of official process with Universal and Decca, the studios, to get the license for that track that can also be really expensive. 

19:48 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
The music, but was it kind of, were you you finding them kind of understanding as well? It was a real game with them. 

19:56 - Guest 1 (Guest)
I think I remember reaching out really early on when we first had the idea of using this particular song. It's called Queendom and we just felt it resonated really well with what the film was about. And I think we really tried to demonstrate to them that the film was not a commercial enterprise, because I think what they're interested in as owners of the license is that you know, they want to cut off the profit if the film takes off which they are owed. But I think when we were able to demonstrate that mostly it was going to be kind of a smaller scale cinematic release on educational platforms, they were then able to charge us a slightly kind of lower fee for it which we could afford. And then we were really lucky that the Uzbek singer was kind enough to let us use her music. 

20:32 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Yeah, I really was impressed. I was like, oh, this is nice. You get a feel for all the different regions and the different dialects I'm guessing, because I didn't know what everything. And then you have the English speaking ones, and I remember there's a scene where you guys are like oh, what's a good song for when we're going up this mountain and then it cuts to the song and I'm like, yeah, that's probably not the song. 

20:53
I chose up this mountain. And then it cuts to the song and I'm like, yeah, that's probably not the song. Your aspect of it is that you guys briefly talked about the research you guys did before leaving, and one of the other things is is meeting these different organizations that you had to go see. For instance, I think there was one that taught women and girls about sex education, and also Zarina, the PhD student that you meet, was one of the first people you reached out to, but is the last person you kind of meet. At least in the documentary, can you share the research that it took and how important it was to have social media to connect you with these people and do that research ahead of time? 

21:38 - Guest 1 (Guest)
We probably had got in touch with about 50% of the women that we talked to in advance of taking the trip, and then the other 50% was purely organic. 

21:48
So it was recommendations from women whilst we were there why don't you go to this village, talk to my cousin, talk, talk to my grandma? 

21:55
But it was really helpful to have some initial contact, and the way in which we kind of researched it was reading a lot of articles by local international journalists and then trying to reach out to maybe the women that they had featured in those articles, and the best way to do that was often social media. Even some of the most remote villages, some of the the girls, had instagram and facebook, and it really helped us to be able to kind of keep in touch with them after we had met them as well, which is really important, and keep them up to date with how the film was progressing. But what we were then able to do is kind of pinpoint okay, we know that there are these women in these different locations along our route, so we know we're going to be stopping off there and it provided a bit of a skeleton, or some extra flesh, I guess, to the skeleton of the drive and then, as we went along, we evolved. You know where we went to and got put in touch with lots of other people as well. 

22:42 - Guest 2 (Guest)
And quite a big thing was the women that I suppose sort of acted like fixers for us. So some of the women like Zarina who you mentioned, that we got in touch with long before we went on the trip and who helped connect us with people on the ground and who did some translating for us and things lots of the work that fixes do in in um the tv and film world is quite invisible and we really wanted those women to actually be. You know, they kind of all had their own stories and they very much feature as characters in the film. So yeah, we kind of kind of wanted all of those women who actually helped us reach out to people to become characters themselves. 

23:17 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
And a lot of these women that you do meet up with. These are remote, I feel like it's very remote areas. Some of the villages you talk about have a population of about 10,000 to maybe 50,000. But you did find people who had pretty decent English speaking, except for one man that you randomly ended up meeting. All of them were female, and how did they kind of explain? How did they learn English? How were they able to be able to communicate in multiple languages? 

23:54 - Guest 2 (Guest)
It was like a real mixture. I mean one of the women, saram, who we interviewed in one of the most remote locations that we could have been, which was sort of very much in rural Turkestan in the Pamir mountain ranges, she was a local English teacher, so that was very much kind of her community role was teaching people English. And then the other thing is that in the Pamir region, even though you know it is very mountainous, it's very remote, they have quite a big university in a town called Horogh where it means that the education for women there is pretty decent. 

24:32
In quite unexpected places we kept coming across women with kind of incredible English women with kind of incredible English, and then in other places it was a bit more broken and we kind of cobbled things together using Google Translate. 

24:43 - Guest 1 (Guest)
So it wasn't always quite as fortuitous as maybe sometimes it looked we were actually quite lucky because our editor, anna, can speak Russian because of kind of where her parents are from. So it meant that she could kind of watch some sections of the film and then she would be able to kind of add the subtitles to the Russian and we'd watch it back and be like, oh, that's what they were saying to us at the petrol station, because we had no idea what some of these kind of what people were really telling us at some point. That was really helpful because it meant that she could kind of transcript and subtitle a lot of the Russian interviews, and some of them were in Russian. That language was kind of spoken throughout the whole region. But then the more local dialects like Tajik, uzbek. 

25:23
We actually reached out to local women in the UK who were from those countries, who really kindly offered to write the transcripts for us, and it was a really nice way to connect with an audience of women from that region living in the UK and actually we then invited them to one of the first test screenings that we did to get their perspective and their input on the film. I think you've got to be really careful when you're making a film about, you know, a culture that's quite distant from your own. You need to be careful that you're not putting words in other people's voices and you're portraying it accurately and sensitively. So it was really important that we brought that group of women to kind of sense, check it for us and give their perspective. 

26:02 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
I think it was a very unique way of saying it. You did need a lot of really young women whose parents were teaching them how to drive. They were going to school. But then there were issues that kept coming up and up again that we don't hear about as much. Domestic violence has always been around, but bridal kidnapping was something that isn't really. I hadn't really heard of it as much. First, you speak with people who sisters in bridal kidnaps, and the parents, even though are a little bit more modern and want their daughters to be educated and independent, would say, no, he's already taken you, you have to stay with this now husband. And you ask, well, what can be done? And they just say nothing. And then you go to this cafe in Kyrgyzstan, batkat, karaköy. 

26:58
Karaköy yeah, annette Karakoy and she had a really cool way of finding certain solutions. One is to work with boys and girls from a young age and also working with the police force to make sure that they understand their duties and to be held accountable. So could you kind of explain some of these issues that people might not be aware of that is probably going on globally, like bridal kidnapping? 

27:28 - Guest 2 (Guest)
Bridal kidnapping is this kind of initially almost a cultural tradition in Kyrgyzstan of men taking a young woman against her will and mean we kind of got different people said different things but effectively raping her so that meant she couldn't go back to her family. People told us different perspectives on it, so we heard from a guy that this was almost all game, this was something performative. There wasn't actually violence or sexual violence involved and it was. You know, it was this kind of long-standing cultural tradition and a bit of a charade. 

28:01
And then we heard from someone like Ipery who talked about her sister and it very much is violent, sexually violent, and so we had these different perspectives on it and it is kind of complicated to know how much this is actually a sort of cultural thing that has more agency for women than it might seem and how much of it is very much this kind of violent practice. But what we do know is that there have certainly been a number of violent incidents of it and also instances of the police not taking it seriously. And then I think it was in 2021, or maybe earlier actually that there was a young woman in police custody who was the police kind of sent her back to her husband and she was murdered by her husband. So there's not very effective policing of this. So it's a complicated issue that is quite specific to the region but in its worst case is pretty shocking. 

28:51 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Well, I think it's the term. Bridal kidnapping might be for that region, but the idea of it's still kind of a form of abuse and domestic abuse and or just the idea that a woman family can't get the help that they need. And then I really appreciated Zarina, the PhD student. When she talks about feminism, she talks about working with men and women, boys and girls yeah because the men also found they do feel a pressure. 

29:22
Well, you have to get married, you have to procreate, then you have to provide for that family. How are you going to provide for that family? Then there's that pressure. Meanwhile, the woman you have to be raising the family, you have to do this and this, and that. It's this vicious cycle. So unless you work together, it's not going to get any better. 

29:41
And you guys had a lovely moment in the car where it seems like you guys just bumped into this woman and she's like come stay at our place. And her kids are like, yeah, sleep over. And she sort of jokingly but also seriously said oh, it's either it's winter or something. And she says my husband's not doing anything, it's not working season for him, so he's just going to sit and watch TV and sleep, right. So your hosts seem very kind and you guys are sleeping and the kid looks so excited that you guys were staying over. And then you leave the next day and you're like I realized I was judging the husband or many of the men, and you realize either they leave to find work and they might not come back for years, so the kids don't have a male father figure, or they wait until it's time for work. And what else do they do? Education is not number one, and so you see the differences, that there are male problems as well, and that needs to be accounted for too. Could you guys kind of talk about that? 

30:48 - Guest 1 (Guest)
There's so much nuance, so much nuance, and I think, yeah, in this particular instance she had said that, oh, my husband kind of sits around in the winter and we judged him for that, and then actually the next day we'd reflected on it and been like this is such a remote part of the world with really cold conditions, snow everywhere. 

31:04
There just simply isn't the infrastructure or jobs available for men in the winter, and actually maybe we shouldn't be so judgmental about that and we need to look at it with a different view. 

31:22
And it kind of explains why so many of them are then moving to Russia, in particular to get jobs in the labor force and leaving these very kind of female dominated communities, which is what we had found initially very interesting about the region. But at the same time there was a lot of stories of men who would move and, you know, eventually the remittances that they would send home to Tajikistan would dry up. Maybe they'd find a new wife or a new family in Russia. The kids might not ever see their father again. You know there's so many different dimensions and elements to these issues that there's no kind of single way to describe it, but I remember reading a bit about how during COVID, when everything kind of shut down, a lot of these men in Russia came back because there was no jobs for them available in Russia anymore and there was apparently a real resurgence in domestic violence. 

32:04 - Guest 2 (Guest)
So there's so many of these kind of issues that are intertwined and interlinked and a lot of nuance to it, and it's worth saying as well that you know we didn't just come across a lot. 

32:11
A lot of the people that were reinforcing kind of stereotypes around women or reinforcing roles were sometimes like women of an older generation as well. It very much wasn't just, you know, change isn't happening because men are stopping it. Lots of women talked about the role of this traditional role of like the mother-in-law who you know probably has been treated badly herself and then expects to treat her daughter-in-law as she was treated and that kind of perpetuates certain gendered roles. And so, yeah, you know it was treated and that kind of perpetuates certain gendered roles. And so, yeah, you know it's a very complicated picture and I think we went into this, you know, as 22-year-olds with a quite kind of westernized idea of feminism and it definitely all of the conversations we had just put layer and layer of nuance on top of that that it's a much more complicated web of power dynamics that lead to some of the oppression of women there. 

33:04 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Along with that. It sounded like because of technology being one of the reasons access to more education or access to finding more information. And there was this one woman who explained that after the Soviet Union women had a lot more power and then in the 90s and the 2000s it kind of slowed down and I was like, wait why? But then you guys, well, hold on. If we can teach ourselves the older generation at their own pace, as well as the new generation, our babies, boys and girls to be like, hey, actually kidnapping is not okay. This is what your body is going through, so at least you can understand why you're feeling certain ways and then how to build together a healthier community. I saw a glimpse of that from some of the places, like the cafe owner. So there is kind of hope, but it takes a while and it goes back to something at the very end where you're like it's these small steps, it's we want like a solution. There's a problem, there's a solution and you're done. But it's not ever that simple, is it? 

34:25 - Guest 1 (Guest)
yeah, it's small incremental steps within the remit that these women can. That we might not consider a traditional feminist action from our kind of vantage point in the uk, but actually when we started to put all these small collective steps together it amounts to kind of what we've ended up describing as a feminist revolution happening, you know, almost underneath the covers when you really dig into it, but each woman doing something different in her own way just to make life that little bit better for her daughter. 

35:00 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
It was really well done, and have you been able to stay in touch with any of these communities? Yeah, we have. 

35:07 - Guest 2 (Guest)
Some more easily than others, just because of the nature of how remote some of the people that we spoke to were. One in particular, and so Jamilia, who you were talking about, who was doing a lot of work with her local community to try and prevent domestic violence. She stayed in touch until very recently and we did a bit of a crowdfund because she has been setting up a refuge for women in the local community. So we, through our screenings, managed to raise some money for keeping the lights on in that building. 

35:38 - Guest 1 (Guest)
She's doing community activities I think she's got about 10 families living there at the moment and also for a security person to be at the door of this kind of refuge to protect the women from maybe any angry husbands who might be coming to visit. But the details of our crowdfund for her are still on our website, so any donations that come through we pass directly on to her and she keeps us up to date with photos of what they've been able to purchase with the budget. 

36:04 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
That was. The other thing is that where can people learn more and also know how can they help out, and help out their own communities? 

36:13 - Guest 2 (Guest)
We've got various links on our website for some of the organizations that we worked with, including that little crowdfunder for Jamilia. I think another big thing is and that there has been quite a big crackdown on freedom of journalists actually across all three countries, but particularly in Tajikistan and in the Pamir region of Kyrgyzstan. So mainly kind of spreading news and messages is is one of the biggest things that people can do to help as well, just because journalism is just getting harder and harder in certain parts of where we filmed. 

36:44 - Guest 1 (Guest)
And I'd also say feel free to reach out to us. You know the details of our contacts are on the website. We've got Instagram, facebook, email. If people have more questions, want to know more about specific topics, we're always really happy to kind of have a chat and tell them a bit more and it's the cat and pan dot wix site dot com. 

37:04 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Slash women behind the wheel. 

37:05 - Guest 2 (Guest)
Yeah, we'll have it is yes, uh, two in cheapskate. 

37:09 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
So actually have a domain name, yeah, um and then I'll have it on the show as well. And yes, thank you so much. And yeah, uh, everyone should check out women behind the wheel. It is available and it was really. 

37:24 - Guest 1 (Guest)
I mean, there's so many other aspects about it that we could go on and talk, but well, we'd love to come back and and yeah do a screening and maybe another q a, if that's possible, and for for those who maybe can't join that, the film is available via Docksville globally. It's available through Amazon on the UK as well, and if anyone is struggling to get hold of it then we just ask them to reach out and we can try and sort them out with another kind of link to watch it. Thanks so much. Thank you, tara. 

37:53 - VO (Host)
Cheers. Thanks for listening to Media Maker Spotlight from Women in Film and Video. To learn more about WIF, visit w-i-f-as-in-frank-v-as-in-victororg. This podcast is created by Sandra Abrams, Candice Block, Brandon Ferry, Tara Jabari and Jerry Reinhart, and edited by Michelle Kim and Inez Perez, with audio production and mix by Steve Lack Audio. Subscribe. To continue learning from more amazing media makers, Please visit mediummakerspotlightcom for more information.