Over the course of a few hours, Schnuck trains methodically, moving from her warm up to the series of three lifts that make-up powerlifting: deadlift, bench press, and squat. Some days, she meets her lifting goals and tracks her weight numbers in a spiral-bound notebook. Other days, she feels the heaviness of the round, candy-colored weights defeat her and the figures stare back at her—the representation of her athletic ability. They can be a source of painful disappointment.  

“I don’t think I have good genes for any kind of sport,” she says. “Nobody is ever taught how to be athletic.”

Since 2015, women’s participation in powerlifting has more than doubled. Often documented through instagram athletes and encouraged by the mantra “strong is the new skinny,” the face of heavy lifting has been changing.

Schunck, while part of that movement, is also very different than the lean, white, pony-tailed visage typically smiling and sweating on your screen. She is not the best, not the strongest, and not the loudest—in fact, she shirks most public affirmations of her athletic prowess or progress.

“Powerlifting has given me a greater focus, a goal,” she says. “I have to say, I really do enjoy the challenge.” Week after week, as the numbers rise and fall, as her determination grows and wanes, Schunck persists.

She makes that Saturday morning drive, rallies herself, and lifts.

Meet The Filmmakers Highlighting The Complexity Of Modern Marriage For Women In India

In ‘A Suitable Girl,’ an all-women-of-color team shines a light on the invisible lives of women in India.

Still from ‘A Suitable Girl.’ Courtesy of Smriti Mundhra

It t took me a great deal to explain that this is not under pressure; this is what I have chosen,” Amrita emphasizes while trying on her wedding shoes. She’s a cosmopolitan woman based in Delhi, India who is speaking to the camera about having to reassure her friends that she is happy about getting married. She just introduced herself to the audience as someone who has “complete freedom.”

She does, however, declare that her parents started looking for a groom for her and insisted on her giving up her career, as soon as she completed her MBA.

The contradiction comes to full focus on Amrita’s wedding day, when her expression darkens amidst the bright colors, music, and noise of the festivities, spilling into silent tears.

The moment is just one of many that reveal the complexity of marriage in A Suitable Girl, a documentary that debuted at the Tribeca film festival and was just brought to the masses on Amazon Prime.

The film, made by a creative team entirely comprised of women of color, follows the fate of three women as they search for a groom and ready themselves to leave their parent’s homes to get married, across two metropolitan cities in India.

“Having women shoot the film, especially in certain situations, was really critical because we were dealing with a very sensitive, very vulnerable time in these women’s lives,” says Smriti Mundhra, who co-directed the film with Sarita Khurana.

Both directors are South Asian, but were raised in the United States, which meant they could instantly build a rapport with their subjects. As such, the protagonists did not have to worry about being judged, or having to be presentational. At the same time, the directors were able to observe from a slightly outsider perspective, not having lived in India themselves.

What emerges is an intimate, nuanced look at the invisible lives of women.

Explains Mundhra:

“There are so few opportunities, for women of color especially, to fully explore the breadth of our experience without interjection from either patriarchal culture, even as that manifests in the film industry, or Western culture, so it was really important to us to tell this story and do this work on our terms.”

Being able to tell the story through the lens of women directors has immense consequences on the storyline. Oscar-winning The Big Sick and Meet the Patels are two recent documentaries showcasing arranged marriages in South Asian communities; both, and others like it, have been criticized for presenting women of color as caricatures. In multiple films on the topic, women of color are an afterthought to be pitied — far from being the protagonists.

A Suitable Girl eschews this narrative, choosing to explore the modern arranged marriage process for educated, working women, without going in with preconceived ideas or trying to manufacture a story to suit Western misconceptions.

Instead, the filmmakers embedded themselves in the lives of Amrita (described above), who gives up her career and cosmopolitan Delhi lifestyle to live with her husband’s family in a small town 400 miles away; Dipti, a Mumbai schoolteacher in her early thirties who is struggling to find a husband; and Ritu, an economist who works for Ernst & Young in Mumbai and has no interest in getting married, but is visibly pressured by her mother Seema, who happens to be a matchmaker.

The result? Over 700 hours of footage, shot over the period of four years.

What sets the film apart from most other documentaries: It has a particular emotional, if subtle, form of storytelling.

The process continued for another three years of editing:

“Our editor would find moments that might not have been evident for a man, such as a look, a feeling — something — that showed what was going on within. We left a lot of big, sensational stuff on the cutting room floor, because this film is about the inner lives of women, so we used those moments to tell the story.”

This makes sense when portraying a culture where women are expected to be “softly spoken” and accommodating — their individual needs and wants often silenced. It’s also what sets the film apart from most other documentaries; it has a particular emotional, if subtle, form of storytelling.

The audience is devastated to see Dipti lying on her parent’s sofa in silence, deflated by the match-making process, frustrated when Amrita looks up at her Western clothes packed away on a shelf out of reach in her new closet full of saris ––because that’s how her father-in-law prefers it––and pained along with Ritu when she is standing in the kitchen learning to cook from her domestic helper instead of joining her family who are enjoying practicing a dance to perform at her wedding. It is perhaps she, the economist, who has the most clear-sighted and astute understanding of marriage — it is, underneath the music, romance, and festivities, a social arrangement that will require her to play a certain role within its structure.

The documentary provides a fascinating portrait of modern India, where old and new clash. Dipti, the most shy of the trio, turns to internet matchmaking sites, while Ritu’s mother Seema consults a face-reader to determine the eligibility of matches for her daughter, by showing him photos of prospective grooms on her smartphone. Professional photo shoots go hand in hand with special religious ceremonies and blessings to aid in the search for a partner. The women we expect to choose their life partners themselves are matched by their parents, and those we don’t fall in love through their own choosing.

Unlike many other films in the genre, A Suitable Girl does a stellar job in presenting nuance on a topic that has long been misunderstood and misrepresented in the West.

The documentary provides a fascinating portrait of modern India, where old and new clash.

However, despite the surface of modernity, old, patriarchal structures remain strong, and these are reminiscent of similar structures in the West. For example, the way Dipti is judged by other men to be “too heavy” reminds us of how women’s bodies are objectified and judged everywhere. Countless other echoes between India and the West follow — the commodification of women, their invisible work and emotional labor in society, the curbing of their freedom and economic potential — which makes the documentary a thought-provoking watch for people of all cultures.

As Mundhra explains:

“I think that this type of coming-of-age experience — this idea of trying to find space for your own voice, and your own life and identity in a society that has decided that for you — is something that a lot of women can relate to.”

That is what makes the documentary so effective. As we follow these women, we get to know them as people and become invested in their stories.

Each woman is an individual and each of their experiences is different, despite the film’s common theme of portraying the marriage process in India. Perhaps the most heartbreaking story is Amrita’s, who feels like she has lost her identity since getting married.

As the documentary ends, we see the reality of her new life––a world’s away from the party-loving, self-described shopaholic Amrita we first met.

She talks about never wanting to lose her identity after getting married. But now, more than 80% of people she regularly encounters only refer to her in relation to her husband, likely never knowing her name, she tells the camera. “I do have a name,” she says. “You can call me Amrita.”

By bringing the invisible to light, A Suitable Girl ensures we never forget.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/life-after-life-documentary-takes-aims-at-america-s-racist-criminal-justice-system-c729459fb8e/ Sat, 26 Aug 2017 00:46:03 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=4564 Read more]]> ‘America places people into poverty and then criminalizes them. We’ve got to ask ourselves, what kind of force do we want to be as a country?’

Harrison celebrating at his graduation.

Circles are deceptively simple. A smooth ring with no edges or sides, circles are often made synonymous with the bittersweet cycles that govern our lives.

But their simple structure belies their more sinister nature. And perhaps there is no circle more sinister than the one we call our justice system.

Life After Life traces the journey of three men of color returning home from San Quentin State Prison in California, painfully illustrating the systemic racism that dominates American incarceration and the glaring lack of restorative justice for the 2.3 million people living in varying stages of captivity. According to the U.S. Census, Blacks are incarcerated five times more than Whites, and Hispanics are nearly twice as likely to be incarcerated as Whites.

Filmed over 10 years by Tamara Perkins — who began her journey in 2006 while teaching yoga at San Quentin — Life After Life was crafted from more than 250 hours of footage and aims to complicate the dialogue around those who’ve committed violent crimes; the film is a touching — if harrowing — portrayal of the complicated societal forces that prey on our most vulnerable communities.

Trauma, addiction, violence, poverty, and racism intersect in a twisted kaleidoscope that has rendered these men — like millions of others — “murderers and monsters” in the eyes of society, when in reality they were mere children suffering under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

“America places people into poverty and then criminalizes them,” says Perkins matter of factly. “Our current system does not help the victim. It’s all about punishment with no care for cost. We’ve got to ask ourselves, what kind of force do we want to be as a country? Do we want people to thrive? What is our end goal as a society?”

Perkins, who has worked in grief and trauma for the past 17 years, also watched her Nephew — who is half black — get “the book thrown at him.” Although Perkins worked closely with the superintendent of the juvenile hall and the chief probation officer — and knew many of the judges when he was first arrested — she could do nothing to stop the process of mass-criminalization that actively feeds on young black boys.

She vowed to take aim at the system that took a child and nearly broke him.

Life After Life is taking that aim.

Harrison Suega, 45, and Noel Valdivia, 55, had both been serving life sentences at San Quentin for murders they committed at 17 and 18, respectively. Chris Shurn, 35, was first arrested for armed robbery at 16 and then sentenced to life when he was convicted of drug possession at 22.

Collectively they’d spent 61 years behind bars. All three men are on parole for four years; they must stay within a 50 miles radius and operate under a 10 p.m. curfew.

Seems simple enough, but when you’ve been stripped of your agency, your identity, your very adulthood, and face a devastating lack of support and understanding of a world without cement walls, creating a new life can feel nearly impossible.

And it nearly is.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, more than 65% of those released from California’s prison system return within three years. Nationally, 650,000 people are released from prison every year and 2 out of 3 will reoffend in 3 years.

And while it feels exponentially easier to relegate these staggering recidivism rates to moral corruption, depravity, laziness, or some such belief that tidily places the blame on the prisoners’ obvious deficiencies, Life After Life illustrates how deeply flawed and problematic these narratives are.

Harrison has had a long time to consider what feels like personal failure when it’s actually the dizzying cycle of poverty and violence that follows families for generations.

“I was raised the way my father was raised, “ he says in the film. “Discipline. Punish. You can get used to getting beat up.” Harrison says his father used to mercilessly beat his mother as well. He says his inability to protect her haunts him. “I wanted to defend her but I was too afraid. I felt so weak.”

Harrison’s abusive father eventually absconded with him to Los Angeles, where he fell in with a gang “who became his new family.” He began selling drugs to try and get back to his mother in Hawaii, but fired a gun in a deal gone wrong — frantic, frightened, and drunk — and found himself in prison instead. He was 17.

“Everything was violence,” says Noel, the son of farm laborers in Stockton, California. “I was a scary kid. At 18 I tried to rob someone, the guy reached for the gun and before I knew it, my hands were on the trigger and he was falling to the ground.” He was denied parole 11 times and finally litigated his own case to achieve parole.

“Every child is innocent,” says Chris. “Until something breaks and you become a survivor.” At age 5, Chris witnessed his mother get stabbed in the chest by her husband. She escaped death, but recognizes her children weren’t able to escape the trauma. Her eyes haunted and brimming with tears, she says, “They never got the counseling they needed.”

Perkins believes the intersecting roles of race and implicit bias cannot be underestimated. “Black children are almost four times as likely to be suspended than white preschoolers,” she says. “You have to unpack that. We are starting this punitive action in kindergarten.”

She points to a chilling study conducted by Yale last year which revealed the incredible discrimination that plague black and brown children; this racism underpins our industrial prison complex and destroys millions of black families across America.

While we’d like to believe that the particulars of a child’s home life are often unknowns to their teachers and thus they’re punishing them for acting out like they would punish any student — what the study discovered is precisely the opposite.

According to Gilliam’s study, black preschoolers in America are more than three times as likely to be suspended than their white classmates. “Implicit biases do not begin with black men and police,” says Walter S. Gilliam, lead researcher and Yale child psychology professor. “It begins with black preschoolers and their teachers, if not earlier.”

“If a teacher knew more about the child’s situation — they were hungry, dealing with abuse, uncertainty and trauma in the home, and they were the same race, empathy went up, but if they weren’t the same race…the punitive reaction was actually higher,” Perkins explains. “We expect little black boys — just as we expect grown black men — to behave badly, despite all the evidence that runs contrary to that belief.”

While Life After Life is equal parts heartbreaking and infuriating, it’s also designed to spurn a dialogue around restorative justice. It’s designed to offer a solution and a way forward.

“For most of the men and women who I’ve worked with in trying to transition home, they’re amazing allies in supporting youth. We should be leaning into them,” she says. “Once someone has a felony it closes so many doors for the rest of their life. So this to me is both the pathway to employment and a way to reach youth.”

Perkins explains that another piece of the puzzle is the way we treat these crimes and the people who commit them as though they’re operating in a vacuum. When you start tracing the effects of a life sentence on a family, the fallout becomes exponentially more complicated. When you jail someone for 25 years, you are not only harming the individual, but every single person that cares about them.

“Look at Noel and his family. Every one of those 45 people were impacted by him being incarcerated for 30 years,” says Perkins.

“We need spaces in which we can heal communities. And I’m not saying there’s no room for punitive actions but in restorative justice, it’s about offering support instead of compounded harm. We could spend a fraction of what we do on incarceration if the focus instead was on seeing the whole child and providing whatever that family needs support for addiction or substance abuse. Simply making sure they have food.”

And let’s be clear: White privilege is potent, ubiquitous, and undeniable. Treating every individual identically — ignoring the “whole child,” the child with absent parents, daily violence or exposure to addiction — is as ridiculous as it is dangerous.

“If you already have incredible resources and a legacy of success behind you then your baseline reality is in a total different realm,” says Perkins. “And the irony is, as a society we don’t want you to be able to understand this horrible trauma. But hopefully this film allows you to know someone who’s served life in prison. Walk a mile in someone’s shoes. You never hear anyone say ‘PTSD,’ but the entire film is dealing with under-addressed trauma. It underlies everything.”

When I ask Perkins what exactly she hopes the film will accomplish, she falls silent for a moment and shakes her head. I think she’s worked on it for so long, her hopes are massive — and complex. But then she speaks. “If the audience just came out of the film and said to themselves, ‘This is a public health issue! Oh my god, we need healing and mental health-care for young people! In the prison! For everyone transitioning home! And we should provide resources for communities to provide this care!’ That would go a long way.”

But as Harrison reminds us, his eyes scanning the horizon, “There is an expectation that for children of color, that prison is unavoidable at some point in their life. It’s ridiculous.”

But if we don’t address the racism and systemic oppression that comprises the very foundation of our society, if we don’t address the racism that continues to prey on those who most need our protection, this expectation feels less ludicrous than it does logical.

Want to get involved?

August 29 Screening, Panel and Resource Fair
Sacramento, CA

Please join us for the Sacramento debut of Life After Life, followed by a panel discussion featuring Noel Valdivia Sr. and Harrison Seuga from the film, along with the filmmaker and local community leaders. This event is co-presented by The California Endowment, Anti-Recidivism Coalition, and Sierra Health Foundation.

REGISTER — FOR FREE — RIGHT HERE!

September 15–17, Justice on Trial Film Festival
Loyola Marymount University | Los Angeles, CA

The Justice on Trial Film Festival speaks to the challenges of people caught up in the judicial system. But their voices are often unheard beyond their own communities. The film festival creates an opportunity to project their voices to a world deafened by the negative images and stereotypes presented by the media.The Justice On Trial film festival grew out of a conversation between award-winning author Michelle Alexander and Susan Burton, founder of A New Way of Life Re-Entry Project.

BUY FESTIVAL TICKETS HERE!

Interested in hosting a screening? Contact the filmmakers at tamara@lifeafterlifemovie.com.

By Monica Busch

If you haven’t heard, R&B singer Chris Brown is planning to release a documentary chronicling his life, rise to fame, and subsequent infamy following his 2009 assault on then-girlfriend and Grammy award-winning singer Rihanna. The documentary, dubbed Welcome to My Life, does not have a release date, but Brown Tweeted the trailer earlier this week.

In the trailer, Brown’s rapid rise to fame is recounted, along with his early days dating Rihanna, which is described as “magical.” He is also lauded by artists like Usher, Jennifer Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as essentially being a gift to the modern entertainment industry. But before very long, suspenseful music builds and Brown remarks that he “went from being kind of like America’s sweetheart to Public Enemy №1” following his assault on his ex-girlfriend — the altercation that left the pop star’s face peppered with bruises, as seen in the now jarringly familiar photo of her face following the attack.

“I felt like a fucking monster,” Brown says. “I was thinking about suicide and everything else. I wasn’t sleeping, I barely ate. I was just getting high.”

The trailer ends with Brown promising that, despite doubts that some may harbor, his career is far from over.

If this sounds like a gross way of capitalizing on his indiscretions and a sneaky attempt to not quite take ownership of his actions, it’s because a bird that waddles and quacks is often a duck. While both Chris Brown and Rihanna have been largely quiet about the 2009 altercation aside from heavily coded lyricism, Chris Brown’s narrative has varied wildly from remorse to forgetfulness. One minute he says the night of the assault was a blur, the next he says it wasn’t. What is certain, however, is that choosing to address this one event in the first trailer for a documentary that one expects will cover his entire life is an intentional way to draw viewers in by making his violence the focal point.

Despite attempts by his mother, Joyce Hawkins, to downplay her son’s violent and aggressive reputation — one that far exceeds the infamous battering — Brown’s name is rarely uttered in the media without Rihanna’s close behind. While Rihanna’s victimization should not be — and is not — her identity, Chris Brown’s flagrant disregard for a woman’s physical and emotional well-being certainly should follow him. Rightfully, it does. Wrongly, he’s attempting to monetize his record in a way that requests sympathy from viewers.

Any trauma a perpetrator of domestic violence experiences from public shaming cannot reasonably exceed the trauma experienced by the target. But what else can be inferred from a trailer that, by highlighting Chris Brown’s depleted social standing and resulting stress, necessarily implies a juxtaposition of his sinking fame with the ever-growing success of his ex-girlfriend? Emphasizing how bad the aftermath was for Chris Brown is only marginally removed from victim blaming since, after all, Rihanna is the physical being around which his trauma resulted. In the clips, he makes the tragedy of being beaten up entirely about him. It’s like Brown is silently asking, “Couldn’t we/she/everyone have gone a little bit easier on me?” It’s like he’s saying that intentionally causing harm to another human being was just a simple lapse of judgement and self control that he doesn’t deserve to suffer for anymore.

Of course, the response should be that he is an able-bodied male who knew what he was doing when he put his girlfriend in a headlock and proceeded to beat her, but unfortunately we live in a society that continuously pardons and pities offenders of — specifically — violence against women. This, of course, is not new.

Take, for example, the Steubenville rape case trials in 2013, when CNN came under fire for lamenting the ruined futures of two teens convicted of raping an underage girl. Or the litany of sports figures and media outlets that said former Ravens running back Ray Rice should have been allowed to re-join the NFL, even after video surfaced of the player attacking his then-fiancee in an elevator. Or, take the 48 Hours special on Lauren Astley, a Massachusetts teenager who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend: While the coverage is arguably mostly narrative, the title — Loved to Death — is quite an introduction to a story about breakup violence.

Some may argue that Chris Brown served out his punishment via probation and community service, but the question is not whether he deserves to continue working or making music — that’s an argument for a different time. The question is whether he should be able to profit off marketing his life story as a tell-all about a high-profile domestic assault case that has the potential to not only re-victimize his ex-girlfriend, but also could be told through a medium that will not result in his monetary benefit.

Chris Brown is capitalizing off of his own violent acts — commodifying the actual, literal pain he inflicted on a person he was in a romantic relationship with. Usher remarks in the trailer, “If you truly love Chris Brown, then you felt everything that has gone on with him.” But combatting domestic violence is about prevention and trauma care, not spinning one’s life in some attempt to spring back into public favor by pandering to voyeuristic consumerism. It’s not about feeling what Chris Brown has felt, it’s about not excusing what Rihanna felt.

***

Lead image: YouTube

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