The Fly on the Wall

She was to soon find a focus for her documentary — the practice of bride price; Afghan girls as young as 12 negotiate with their families the price at which they should be married off.

In one scene, Alizadeh, then not more than 15, is sitting with her friends and discussing bride price and husbands as ordinarily as other young girls discuss Facebook likes and One Direction. “Did you agree or did they (family) beat you?” she asks a girl, her friend, who responds, “They beat me first”. Maghami notes that there is a fair degree of coercion and physical abuse by the family. The prospective brides are evaluated and a price is decided — this tradition of mahr preys on the rampant poverty Afghan people live in and reinforces the restrictive laws against women.

The narrative in the film takes a different route when it’s Alizadeh’s turn to be sold into marriage, and her mother expresses her desire to take her back to Herat, Afghanistan. She is to be married off for a sum of 9,000 dollars so that her brother can buy his own wife for 7,000. Maghami buys Alizadeh’s freedom by paying 2,000 dollars to her family. “The situation gave rise to an internal conflict between myself and the filmmaker. When her mother arrived, the filmmaker in me was very happy about the conflict it would bring in the film, but it did give rise to the possibility that the film would have an alternate ending, where she would be taken away. I don’t like that kind of a movie,” says Maghami. In the film, she has Alizadeh share her dreams — among others, to have Rihanna and Michael Jackson as her parents.

With her active involvement in Alizadeh’s life, Maghami also influenced her subject. “Documentary conventions are sacred and I broke them. I’m a puppeteer, controlling. Documentary filmmakers are not objective, they just claim to be,” says the 40-year-old director who screened the film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the IDFA Amsterdam Film Festival, 2016.

Maghami also filmed Alizadeh’s music video for her rap song Brides for Sale. It has the rapper dressed in white, bruised, with a barcode on her forehead. She sings, I scream to make up for a woman’s lifetime of silence, I scream on behalf of the deep wounds on my body… A body that broke under the price tags you put on it. Shared online by Maghami’s close network of friends, the video has received several views in the US. Her film, Sonita, though cannot be shared back home — it can’t be screened in Iran because her hair shows, or in Afghanistan, where there are no movie theatres.