Director and UCLA anthropologist Robert Lemelson follows three polygamous families in Bali for seven years, encouraging them to recount sometimes-painful details of their daily lives, though even that was an arduous process, as Lemelson says in a phone interview. At first [the subjects] were telling us what they thought we wanted to hear, he says. Finally, going back year after year, they started opening up. What they reveal, in bits and pieces, are some of polygamys darkest, most abusive byproducts (at least one of the women was forced to marry against her will). The idea for Bitter Honey came to Lemelson while working in Bali on another film, 40 Years of Silence (youtu.be/KBecnzZYaXw), which focused on the mass killing and rape of thousands of women throughout Indonesia. In that research, Lemelson interviewed women who recalled horrible domestic abuse at home, and he noticed that many of them happened to be in polygamous unions. In this film, Lemelson intends to highlight Indonesias kinship between gendered violence and polygamy, though he notes that, as an anthropologist, he wasnt trying to point fingers at other societal systems or only show the unhappy side—he strove only to show what we saw. H/t Jezebel (jezebel/bitter-honey-tackles-polygamy-in-indonesia-from-womens-1656049902).
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 01:00:48 +0000
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