‘Saving Face’ Exposes the Practice of Acid Throwing

“My husband threw acid on me, and my sister-in-law threw gasoline on me,” reports Rukhsana. “And then my mother-in-law lit a match and set me on fire.” As she talks, Dr. Mohammad Jawad takes notes and nods. When he asks where she’s living now, he learns that the 25-year-old Rukhsana has moved back in with the husband and his family because, she says tearfully, her children became sick and she couldn’t afford to take care of them. The doctor looks at her, at the table, and he can’t speak; he turns away from his patient and the camera. “I’m trying not to be angry,” he tells his interviewer later. “I don’t want to hear these stories any more.”

Here the documentary Saving Face cuts to Muzaffargarh, the village in Pakistan where Rukhsana lives. Brief images show women working in the fields, goats making their way through the streets, Rukhsana pumping water by hand. The film — codirected by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Daniel Junge and winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Short — doesn’t detail the connections between poverty and violence against women, but it’s clear enough that Rukshana lacks options.

In this, she’s typical of victims of acid throwing, a crime that Nicholas Kristof has called “terrorism that’s personal”. Saving Face insists on both terms in this phrasing, focusing on individual women’s stories, as well as Dr. Jawad’s. His follows a familiar trajectory: a successful plastic surgeon currently practicing in London, he returns to Pakistan regularly in order to help acid attack victims. “I love to do the breast work,” he says, “but what I’m known for is my burn work.” And so it made sense to him, when he learned about the increasing numbers of women being attacked in Pakistan (over 100 reported attacks per year, with many others unreported), that he would go back to help.

Jawad underscores that he’s not able to fix everything, and that the most difficult aspect of his work in Pakistan is “managing expectations.” Such managing is helped as well by the support groups that have grown up in Pakistan and elsewhere, including Acid Survivors Foundation. Meeting other victims and staying at safehouses help to alleviate the feelings of isolation and shame that so often follow such brutality (a point the film underlines with shots of women laughing together). “After meeting these women,” says 39-year-old Zakia, “I got a lot of courage showing my face.”

The organization also helps organizers against the practice to collect stories and mount legal cases. According to lawyer Sarkar Abbas, the “Most women in our society do not come to the courts for justice,” because the laws tend not to protect victims and “most culprits are acquitted.” Zakia, burned by her husband, Pervez, has been waiting for the court case to be resolved. He appears in a police van, in a cage, as he waits to appear in court. “Why did she want to divorce you?” asks Obaid-Chinoy from off-screen. “What happened happened,” he answers, “I never intended to do this and I didn’t do this. It’s a conspiracy against me.” His father, standing alongside the van nods.

Rukhsana’s husband denies his guilt as well. The film precedes his version of events with a visit to the room where she was attacked. “My life was destroyed in this room,” she says, “They latched the door from the outside, so that I would suffocate to death.” The camera shows pocked walls and cluttered shelves, brown paper patched over the window, a cot. “When I’m in this room, I’m frightened,” she says, “I remember that incident.” The camera pitches to show the door, then shows Rukhsana, gazing out a smudged, small window, into the dark, as she remembers how her husband tortured her even before the acid attack.

Cut to Yasir, the husband. He seems uneasy in a close, formal interview frame, a white wall behind him. He smiles, maybe, then swallows hard as he declares his innocence. “She has high blood pressure and a temper,” he explains, the camera now tight on his right hand, scarred and misshaped. “One day she lost her mind and threw gasoline on herself.” As Yasir has it, a candle nearby started the fire that destroyed Rukhsana’s life. “So,” Obaid-Chinoy asks from off screen. “Will a married woman with two children simply through acid on herself?” He nods, then instructs her to visit a burn unit someday. “You’ll see, ninety-nine percent of the women there have burned themselves alive.” The interview ends as Obaid-Chinoy asks about the injury to his hand, whether it is a burn injury. It’s the price he paid for putting out the fire, he says, swallowing hard again.

Premiering Thursday at 8:30pm on HBO, Saving Face makes a basic case, that men do what Yasir has done because they can. It means to make that tradition more difficult by exposing it.