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Palestinian In this heartbreaking and enraging documentary, director Antonia Caccia invites Muslim women in the Gaza Strip to tell the stories of their curtailed lives. With unflinching frankness, they speak of abductions into marriage at 12 years of age, of dreams of education and career smashed by annual pregnancy, of weaning daughters early so as to conceive a coveted boychild, of acid thrown in the faces of women who go out unveiled, of a husband shared by several wives, one of them a "feminist." The women in Stories are seared into the mind's eye, unforgettable in their dignity and force of character -- against all odds.
DIRECTOR: Antonia Caccia
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Jonathan Collinson
EDITOR: Brand Thumim
1996
Stories of Honor and Shame completes Antonio Caccia's trilogy of films devoted to Palestinian lives and the difficult issues which consume them in both Israel and the occupied territories. A graduate of the National Film School, Caccia made her film debut in 1970 with End of the Dialogue, one of the earliest documentaries to expose life in the black townships of South Africa. On Our Land (1981), her first film about the Palestinians, was made in 1981 and largely featured the Arab village of al-Fahun in northern Israel. It remains one of the most eloquent films made on the subject of Palestinian dispossession. Voices From Gaza (1989), Caccia's second film, was made during the first year of the intifada and inevitably reflects the events of the period. Stories of Honor and Shame is Caccia's most recent work, and she returns to Gaza where she touches on the deep cultural differences between the Middle East and the West. The film is her most intimate work yet.
Caccia and her Palestinian team, assistant director Marwan Darweish and research Norwraz Abu Mustafa from Gaza's Women Affaires Center, interviewed nearly fifty women before shooting began. They had been warned that while women would speak to them face-to-face, when confronted with a camera, they might not want to be filmed. In the end, only one woman was too frightened to talk on camera. Caccia recalls, "You can have an idea that things are bad for women and perhaps you should make a film about this, but when you are actually confronted with the detailed stories of peoples' lives, it always felt so much worse than anything one had imagined. I used to think, how could they bear it?"
"A lot of people call Gaza 'the big prison' because it is so difficult to get in and out. I remember speaking to somebody about this, and this person said, 'Yes, the men are the prisoners and the women are the prisoners' prisoners.' Before the occupation, there were women who traveled, women swam and played tennis, there was a middle class women's community who were involved in women's struggles so I think there is a feeling that the concentration of the struggle against the occupation put all women's issues on to the side so there wasn't a natural development as there might have been. The only thing one can say against the theory is that there hasn't been much natural development in the Arab world."
Caccia maintains that her social documentaries have been an attempt to "bridge gaps of information." She felt strongly that people must be heard in their own voices, and this is the reason why the stories in Honor and Shame are told mainly in an interview setting. Despite Caccia's own feeling of pessimism when she was making the film, she is not without hope. "Many of the things the women talk about may seen very strange and different from our experience but I found if I want to draw parallels with my grandmother's life or women's lives in the past in the west they would not be so dissimilar. Women often married because things were arranged in some way, and things have changed. So I feel it must change there equally, especially because the women there are so articulate and so conscious. They are not saying, 'This is our culture, this is the way it is and this is the way it should be.' There are many women here who are very oppressed and they accept it completely. So I think a lot has changed in a way and it is small and imperceptible. I just don't see how you keep everyone down forever."
Caccia has devoted more the 15 years to the making of her films and with each she delivers another layer of meaning to the lives of Palestinians.
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Do we just ignore it or what solutions are there to these backwards societies. 
:-S