Forbidden Voices / Yoani Sánchez

Forbidden Voices / Yoani Sánchez
Translator: Unstated, Yoani Sánchez

She asked only to have the same rights enjoyed by a man in her country.
She took the loudspeaker to expose laws that in Iran left her
defenseless and at a disadvantage against men. Blogger and feminist,
Farnaz Seifi went into exile in Germany after having been arrested and
threatened many times in the land of her birth. With her family
victimized by growing coercion, she had to write under a pseudonym. The
drama she is living is an ancient one, but she knows that the absurdity
could end one day, could be over in a moment. This small hope has led
her to refuse to give in, and she has joined the Change for Equality
movement, created by some twenty activists. She uses her keyboard to
stop the scourge, and social networks as a way to denounce the outrages
many women don't dare to speak of.

For her part, Zeng Jinyan holds on to love. That affection that joins
her with Hu Jia, the famous defender of human rights in China. Her
husband has systematically denounced the mistreatment of people with
AIDS and the environmental damage in a country where a single party
promotes a single version of reality. Through the Internet, Zeng has
related her most difficult moments in recent years, the detention and
imprisonment of her husband, the long days of house arrest she and her
baby have been subjected to, and the tender embrace of her husband when
he was freed. Technology brings curious paradoxes; it prevented her from
leaving home, and yet cyberspace shortened the distance between her and
her readers.

I have been placed alongside these two wonderful women in a documentary
that examines the use of new communications media as a weapon against
censorship. Under the title "Forbidden Voices," the Swiss director
Barbara Miller has collected images, interviews and domestic scenes that
show the human being behind a Twitter account, the person whose virtual
presence is much freer than her real one. So this is an accurate story
of four women, three of them eager to find respect and space in their
respective societies, and a fourth, the author of the film, making use
of her lens and great patience to express visually her own rebellion.

14 June 2012

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