Pakistan 1979. Saleem (Aamir Malik) is an aimless youth in love with local beauty Zubeida (Shilpa Shukla) and adored by his widowed mother Ayesha (Kiron Kher). Life seems to flow in measured bucolic beauty but old and new trauma looms because of a pair of fundamentalist Muslim insurgents staying in the village. Their zealotry ignites a macho spark in Saleem and soon he is rejecting his mother for her Sufi philosophy and Zubeida for seeing him outside of wedlock. Things get even
Silent Waters is set in the rural Punjabi village of Charkhi, Pakistan situated near the Indian border in 1979, with the political backdrop being the hanging of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by the new military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq who has promised to enforce Islamic Law using Islamic missionary and political groups to spread Islamism across the nation in earnest. The film is about a middle aged widow, Ayesha, played by the brilliant Kirron Kher and her relationship with her only son, teenager Saleem.
Her son is in love with Zubeida, a teenage village schoolgirl. Ayesha barely manages to support herself and her son by her late husband's pension and by giving lessons in the Qur'an to village girls but she appears to be content and looking forward to her son's impending wedding. She is well respected in the neighbourhood but she harbours a secret by not ever going to the well to fetch water, instead relying on her neighbours to collect it for her.
Two activists from an Islamist group come to the village, and backed by the village landlord, start spreading their message of Islamic zealotry and typically gain disillusioned and young impressionable recruits to fight the then-impending Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The older men in the village react with disdain for the Islamists' message of intolerance and puritanism, even accusing them of being un-Islamic traitors. Amongst the new recruits is Saleem who immerses himself into extremist tendencies on a daily basis having found what he was looking for prior to meeting the activists; namely to lead a more meaningful life than that of a simple village farmer under the command of the feudal landlord. The more extremist Saleem becomes the greater his estrangement from his liberal thinking mother and pretty soon he also abandons Zubeida as they each in turn without reward try to dissuade him from following the Islamists. Saleem steadily grows into an angrier and hostile young man with a new and renewed purpose in life.
A group of Sikh pilgrims are granted permission by the military dictatorship to visit Charkhi from nearby India to pray at a Sikh holy site, the village having been their ancestral home before the creation of Pakistan and forced to flee during the violent partition of India in 1947. Some of the Pakistani villagers treat the pilgrims with a warm welcome whilst others more aligned with the Muslim zealots show hostility. One of the Sikh pilgrims starts enquiring about his long lost sister whom he believes may have survived the violence.
Family tranquillity is shattered when Saleem, already suspicious of his mother's open-minded views about Islam and her open support for the Sikh pilgrims discovers a Sikh pilgrim talking to her outside their house and learns to his disgust that she was abducted during partition and is not the pure Muslim he believed her to be. Ayesha converted from Sikhism to Islam. We also discover that at the time of the partition, a group of Sikh women were lining up at the orders of their men folk to commit suicide by jumping into the well rather than be raped by the rioting Muslim mobs. This discovery brings Saleem into direct conflict with his mother and his new found friends and beliefs and he simply has to choose one or the other.
Ayesha's secret is now under threat as her past catches up with her. Can she rely on her son's support to help her get through the coming ordeal or will old wounds be too strong? Will the revelations that Saleem learns about his mother be enough for him to support his mother or drive him even further into the arms of radicalisation? Can Ayesha be accepted as a Muslim?
Silent Waters is a film trying to investigate the legacy of the tragic events in the old Punjab in 1947, when Muslim and Sikh women alike were abducted, raped and sometimes murdered, and entire communities were split apart. It is very deliberate and interesting that director Subiha Sumar has chosen 1979 as a point of reflection about the past, when Islamic fervour was at it's most turbulent until 9/11 tragically struck us. This film was made after that atrocity in New York that changed the world forever so Sumar had this history and its hindsight to give her some advantage compared to say, My Son the Fanatic which explores a similar theme of Islamic radicalisation of a young man and how he drifts further apart from his liberal thinking father. But that film was more exceptional because it was made before the events of 9/11 and foresaw some of the potential dangers the Western world faced in having to tackle disaffected young impressionable Muslim men becoming radicalised long before we received it from any other media source.
The strength of the film is clearly Khirron Kher's central performance as a mother who has clearly suffered at the hands of this brutal partition and men, both Sikh and Muslim, who either couldn't stand up for Ayesha's rights or simply took advantage of her. Admirably Ayesha maintained her dignity and converted to Islam despite being let down by men of that religion. You can feel her pain and suffering but you can also see that as long as she has her son on her side, she has the will to carry on. But once he starts to drift apart, she becomes vulnerable and that time is actually not a healer. This is essentially a women's film, a feminist film about men letting down women regardless of religion.
The problem is that the film is not well researched and I don't mean by historical facts but by actually trying to understand the people who either became radical or those that tried to radicalise others, and what does it truly mean to be radical. As Malcolm X once said, "extremism in defence of liberty is no vice, moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue." Being extreme is not necessarily a bad thing and depends on the situation. This could have been a virtuoso film if the writer and director had bothered to argue a stronger case for the opposing side of the film's wrath and enemy, namely Islamic extremism. If you do that you make a compelling film and then overcome the obstacle of your bogeyman. As the story developed Sumar should have been able to entertain the opposite negeative forces and their ideas ideas even if they might be repugnant to her. But Sumar went on a self-righteous path that Islamism is the root problem. Maybe it is but you have to make a more compelling case. This makes for a better film when the enemies are stronger. But she makes caricatures of the radicals, turning them into foolish and uneducated people who force their beliefs upon other people.
She had some nice scenes showing some political meetings where we heard some of what made the so-called extremists mad at the world, namely that Pakistan just wasn't progressing since its creation. But it was all done to show how terrible and dangerous these people were. It failed to mention that clearly much of the blame for Pakistan's lack of progress clearly falls on all of the previous governments of Pakistan as people in a position of responsibliity thus leaving it in its current predicament when the film was set, plundering for themselves and bowing to external Western pressures which hasn't always had the Pakistani people's best interests at heart. The extremists felt outside forces were imposing their will on the people who had their own cultures and traditions for many hundreds of years that they valued highly. The very best films are always able to make a case for both sides, arguing for both so you're never sure who is right or wrong and which side is going to win, and which side is the director on. Silent Waters was pretty staunch for only one side. If Sumar had done this she would have weighed each living issue and experienced all its possibilities and then express what she truly believes, that men who interpret religion extremely cause great harm to and control over women's lives. Sumar would then have a controlling idea that has won in its message to deliver a victory, even with great sacrifice, over the powerful forces that she could have arrayed against it.
In many ways the director shot herself in the foot because many intelligent audiences would see that Saleem's alternatives were very bleak as a feudal system awaited him so you understand his disillusionment. The irony of this is that wanting to break free from the choking feudal system where a young person isn't allowed to have any aspirations but instead have his destiny already determined, rather than wanting the American dream of writing his own future, Saleem turned to Islamic extremism, the very opposite of what one would expect.
It is a terrible shame that one of the few films with great potential to put Pakistan on the filmmaking map ends up stifling much of what is good about Sumar's country. I cannot recall any Hindu filmmakers from India making films about their fellow Hindu religious fanatics being responsible for terrible atrocities against Muslim women. But Sumar has done just that for the Muslims with a terrible punch on Pakistan and Islam without looking at the causes a little more deeply. She seems happy to devour anyone she doesn't like. I feel she could have redeemed herself by showing some compassion by the Muslim men. Not all of them were barbaric during partition. It's all too relentlessly gloomy against every Pakistani man, including Ayesha's son Saleem. It's amazing that Ayesha remained a Muslim under the film's circumstances. She actually causes a lack of unity amongst her own people by making this critique in such a way. Sumar could have looked at the problems leading up to 1979 and that all was not right prior to General Zia-ul-Haq's move towards Islamism.
In some ways the film has a disillusionment plot from Saleem's point of view. I find it truly astounding that once Saleem understands his mother's suffering during partition that he would take the path that he does. Having said that, maybe that only promotes Islam as offering a better solution for the young man.
To end on a positive note, the director clearly has an eye for Pakistani culture as she depicts general everyday life very well. I particularly enjoyed the beautiful wedding scene and the colours.
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This debut feature by Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar offers a rare perspective of the polituical evolution of Pakistan, the advent of fundamentalism and the fragile rights of ordinary women. In the hot summer of 1979, widow Ayesha (Kirron Kher) lives with her 18-year-old son Saleem (Aamir Malik) in the Punjabi village of Charkhi near the Indian border, still haunted by the horrors of the Partition. When General Zia comes to power, and two strangers arrive in the village from Lahore preaching revolutionary Islamic values, Saleem and the other young men in the village become caught up in an Islamic fervour that intensifies when Sikh pilgrims arrive from India to worship at the local shrine. Tensions escalate into violence - and the quiet, harmonious lives of Ayesha and her fellow villagers are changed forever.
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