Honour-based violence in Canada on film: how to screen it with care

Most screenings of documentaries about honour-based violence are not run by film programmers. A high school teacher sets them up, or a settlement worker, a campus women's centre, a public library, a faith group that has decided the subject can no longer be left alone. That is a good thing. These films do their most useful work in ordinary rooms, and the people booking those rooms usually know their audience far better than any festival could.

It is also why preparation matters so much. The audience for one of these films may include someone living under exactly the pressure the film describes. It may include someone who has lost a relative, and someone who will hear the whole evening as an attack on their community. A screening that works keeps all three of those people in mind from the first email to the last chair stacked.

The cases that shaped the conversation

Two cases defined how many Canadians first met this subject. In December 2007, Aqsa Parvez, 16, was killed in Mississauga, Ontario. In 2010 her father and brother pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Coverage at the time often narrowed her story to a quarrel over a headscarf, a shorthand that turned a teenager into a symbol.

In June 2009, three sisters, Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, and Rona Amir Mohammad, who lived with the family, were found dead in a car in the Rideau Canal at Kingston. In January 2012 a jury convicted Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Yahya and Hamed Shafia of first-degree murder. The trial was followed closely across the country. It made the phrase "honour killing" part of ordinary Canadian conversation, for better and for worse.

Neither case is material to be handled casually. Both involve surviving relatives, friends, classmates and communities who still live with the coverage. When a film includes them, whoever organizes the screening inherits a share of responsibility for how they are talked about afterward.

Films to consider

In the Name of the Family (2010)

Shelley Saywell's documentary looks at honour killings in North America. Its cases include the death of Aqsa Parvez, the 2008 killing of sisters Amina and Sarah Said in Irving, Texas, and the death of Noor Almaleki in Arizona in 2009. The father of the Said sisters was convicted in 2022, long after the film was finished, so a screening now should bring that outcome into the room. The film itself could not.

For a Canadian audience it is the natural starting point. It sets a Canadian case beside American ones, which makes it hard for anyone to treat the subject as a story from overseas.

Crimes of Honour (1999)

Saywell's earlier film was shot in Jordan and the West Bank and runs a little under an hour. It meets women in hiding from their families, a brother who explains why he killed his sister, and a few women who protect young women in danger. It suits a class studying the subject internationally. It is a harder choice for a community night, where its setting can feed the assumption that the problem belongs somewhere else. Our film note on Crimes of Honour looks at it in more depth.

Banaz: A Love Story (2012)

Deeyah Khan's documentary is about the 2006 honour killing of Banaz Mahmod in London. Its focus on one young woman makes it a strong choice for audiences who need to see a person rather than a phenomenon. For Canadian groups it is useful partly because it is not Canadian: the same pattern, in another country, with other institutions around it.

A wider pairing

Programmers worried about singling out one community can pair any of these with a film about intimate partner violence more generally. Setting one beside Saywell's The War at Home, about women who flee abusive partners, makes the point without a lecture. Control, isolation and the punishment of women who try to leave are not the habits of any one culture.

Before the screening: a checklist

• Watch the whole film yourself first. If you can, watch it a second time with someone from the community your audience comes from, and listen to what they notice.
• Partner with a local organization that supports women and girls at risk, such as a shelter, a settlement agency or a youth service, and ask someone from it to attend and speak.
• Check the rights. A public or community screening normally needs public performance rights from the distributor. Schools should follow their own board's guidance.
• Print information about local services: shelters, crisis lines, youth services and victim services. Put copies where people can take one without being watched, in the washrooms as well as at the door.
• Tell people in advance, in plain words, what the film contains, so nobody is ambushed by it.
• Do not photograph or record the audience, and skip the public sign-in sheet. Who attended a film like this can be information someone else wants.
• Arrange a quiet room nearby and one person, ideally trained, who can step out with anyone who needs to leave.
• Write your opening remarks so they place this violence in many communities, not one.
• Decide how the evening ends before it begins, so it does not simply stop on the film's final frame.

Three rooms, three sets of risks

Classrooms

Talk to the school counsellors before you show anything. Give students a way to step out without having to explain why. Think hard about letters home: for a student whose family is the danger, a detailed note about the lesson can be a risk in itself, so work out the wording with the counsellors rather than sending a template.

High school students are the same age as some of the people these films are about. That is the strongest reason to show the films and the strongest reason for care. With younger classes, a carefully chosen excerpt and a long discussion may teach more than a full screening.

Community screenings

Co-host with an organization rooted in the community you are inviting, not one that arrives from outside to explain it. Expect some defensiveness and plan for it. A host from the community who says plainly that this violence turns up in many places, close to home included, will lower the temperature faster than any statistic.

Collect questions on cards as well as from the floor. People who would never speak up in front of neighbours will sometimes write something down. If you know of a specific threat to anyone connected with the event, talk to your partner organization before publicizing it.

Festivals

Festival audiences choose to be there, which makes them easier to reach and easier to flatter. The usual risk is a panel that talks about a community instead of with it. Put someone from a local support organization on stage alongside the filmmaker and the critic. Keep victims' photographs out of the marketing, and put content notes in the printed guide and on the ticketing page.

Discussion questions

1. Who speaks in the film, and who is only spoken about? Which of the people at risk get to describe their own lives?
2. How does the film explain why the killing happened? Whose explanation gets the most time, and does the film accept it?
3. What does the word "honour" do in these stories? Who gains from its use, and who pays?
4. Does the film present this violence as belonging to one faith or culture? What do you know about similar violence elsewhere, including in communities that look like your own?
5. Where did help exist, and where did it fail? Think about schools, friends, police, shelters and courts.
6. How does the film protect people who are still at risk? Did any of its choices make you uneasy?
7. What would you want to know about how the film was made: how consent was given, and what happened to the participants after broadcast? Our guide to watching a documentary critically suggests more questions of this kind.
8. If a friend told you tomorrow that her family was threatening her, what would you do first?

The last question matters most in a classroom. Leave it until the end, and leave enough time for it.

Words in the room

Language will come up, and the host should be ready for it. "Honour killing" is the term most people know. Many advocates prefer "so-called honour killing" or "honour-based violence", partly to deny the killers' word any dignity and partly to include the threats, confinement and forced marriages that stop short of murder. Others argue these are forms of femicide or family violence and should be named that way, so they are not treated as exotic.

Canadian politics has its own history with the terms. In 2015 Parliament passed a law whose short title used the phrase "barbaric cultural practices", and critics argued that the label did more to stigmatize communities than to protect the women in them. Whatever a group makes of that debate, the host should say at the start which words the evening will use, and why.

When the lights come up

Do not end on the credits. Put a slide with local services on the screen and leave it up while people find their coats, until the room is empty. Ask the person from your partner organization to stand near the door rather than at the front, where a quiet question is easier to ask. The person who most needs that conversation may be the one who said nothing all evening and is first to leave.