Saving Face (2012)

  Here's a funny story.  Way back in 2011/2012, I was trying to add all the Oscar nominees to my Netflix queue (as usual) and was having a bitch of a time finding the shorts (also as usual) so I added a film that had the same name from 2004.  Then eight years went by and I kind of forgot it was supposed to be a placeholder.  So I'm looking up the 2004 one (a POC LGBTQ rom-com) on Prime and right next to it is the Oscar short and suddenly I remember, "dang, I'm supposed to watch the one about women having acid thrown in their faces, not the one with a queer happily ever after."  And I did and that's the review you're getting today.  But here's my dilemma:  should I... a) toss the placeholder and move everything up a spot, b) keep the placeholder but drop it down to the bottom like it's a new movie, or c) leave it in place and just watch it next time I rotate through?

While you're debating, I'm going to talk about this short.

Every year, hundreds of women in Pakistan are victims of acid attacks.  Men, sometimes a husband, sometimes just a rejected prospect, throw caustic or flammable substances into the faces of girls as young as thirteen for the high crime of disappointing them.  The laws against such attacks are a joke and one woman, Zakia, is about to become a test case for enforcing a new Parliamentary edict calling for life imprisonment upon conviction.  Zakia was routinely abused by her husband and filed for divorce.  On the steps of the courthouse, her husband threw battery acid into her face causing extreme disfigurement and the loss of her left eye.  A Pakistani-born plastic surgeon with a thriving practice in London returns to Pakistan every year to provide reconstructive surgery pro bono to Zakia and the the hundreds of women like her.

Zakia is mostly the focus of the 41-minute film but several women are interviewed and their experiences are uniformly horrifying.  Fortunately, in the eight years since this film, new legislation and tougher restrictions on the sale of acid have cut down the numbers but the underlying causes of misogyny, poverty, and abuse still exist.

Currently streaming on HBO if you were feeling too good about the world and needed something to bring you back down.