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"The police have accused three women of stabbing to death a 66-year-old man. The suspects are his ex-wife and two daughters," we learn at the beginning of the film from the evening news on Norwegian television. One of the daughters, 33-year-old Sigrid Beate Edvardsen, confesses to the crime and is eventually sentenced to seven years imprisonment for the murder. What could have led her to do this? After all, the Edvardsens lived in relative luxury in the Norwegian coastal town of Holmestrand and had always appeared to be a model middle-class family. Behind this facade, however, the father regularly committed one of the most despicable crimes. "He first abused me when I was six. As a child I could not tell my father no, and I became the victim of his perverse desires," confides Sigrid Beate, whose father threatened her by saying that if she had told anyone, her mother would have die. From this time on, life for little Sigrid became one of painful suffering. Finally at the age of sixteen she was able to stand up to her father and told her mother the entire story. However, this did not end the abuse. A sensitively filmed and extremely successful directorial debut for Brit Jorunn follows the last days of Sigrid Beate, at this time a mother of a seven-year-old son, before her entry into prison. From photographs in the family archives and a large amount of home-video footage, the author artfully creates a well-balanced picture of the tragic fate of the woman, whose endured suffering finally led her to murder her own father. According to estimates, nearly one out of every ten children in Norway is the victim of sexual abuse. In the majority of cases by someone they trust.
Despite the confining atmosphere of the Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, three women try, each in her own way, to fight for their right to love. The problem is that their hearts belong not to men, but to women. Hidden behind curtains or the grainy pictures of web cameras, they gradually expose the battle that each is fighting with themselves and with those ones close to them. While two of the women have yielded to their natural desires, the third one fought for twenty years and suppressed her desire for women, until she inescapably fell in love. Now she is stricken with panic that this will be discovered and that her life with her children will be destroyed. "The Torah guides us throughout our entire lives and is a guide for all situations. Yet it is silent about lesbian love," says one of the women, whose family after time and with heavy hearts accepts that next to her husband and children, she also has an intimate girlfriend. This poetic and very sensitively filmed picture uncovers the wishes and desires which go beyond the scope of the code of Orthodox Jews.
What I Want My Words To Do To You" offers an unprecedented look into the minds and hearts of the women inmates of New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. The film goes inside a writing workshop led by playwright and activist Eve Ensler, consisting of 15 women, most of whom were convicted of murder. Through a series of exercises and discussions, the women delve into their pasts and explore the nature of their crimes and the extent of their own culpability. The film culminates in an emotionally charged prison performance of the women's writing by acclaimed actors Mary Alice, Glenn Close, Hazelle Goodman, Rosie Perez and Marisa Tomei. "What I Want My Words To Do To You" documents both the wrenching personal journeys undertaken by the inmates to find the words that tell their own stories, and the power of those words to move the outside world.
According to an old Kirgyz proverb, a good marriage always begins with tears. If this were truly the case, then this Central Asian country would be a newlyweds´ paradise. Among the traditions often practiced here is the kidnapping of young girls, who are subsequently violently forced into marriage by the family of the groom. "Stop struggling and don't cry anymore. In time you will get used to it after all. We were also kidnapped when we were young." These are the words of two older women trying to calm down the newly kidnapped girl, who is cowering in fear in the corner of her "new home." Only in extraordinary cases do these girls succeed in escaping. The reasons for the continuance of this tradition, whose practice is in conflict with the law, are many. One is the extremely patriarchal model of the functioning of the Kirgyz society, which results in many men and women being convinced of the nature of male dominance. Another reason is the financial situation of many families, who cannot afford to pay the requested monetary sum to the family of the girl. At the end of the film, we are also witness to a dramatic scene where young Kairgul on her way to school is shoved into a car by several men.
