Anyway, after my review of Star Wars, today I want to write
about a film I watched yesterday which made me think: Suffragette, a 2015 film directed by Sarah Gavron starring Carey
Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep.
I think it's
important to make these kind of films: there are many ways to share the story
of the past events, to hand down these historical facts to the new generations
and films have an important role in this process. Without the conscience of
what we were, we can't built what we will be.
(Did you know?
If you look for some other informations, you could read that it is the
first film shot in the Houses of Parliament.
Interesting, isn't it?)
The story is focused
on the activities of a group of women who join the British women’s suffrage
movement, called WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union), especially on the
life of Maud Watts, a 24-year-old laundress. Here you can read the plot.
The most shocking
things are the sufferings shown in the film: women are treated like objects, they
suffer sexual abuses since the early age and they can't fight against this
unjust society, they can't report anything to the policemen because there aren't laws that can protect them. If women want to keep a job and to have a family, they have to accept to be humiliated.
They protest, but doing so they become outcasts: society criticises and isolates them, they are beaten with no mercy and then arrested and imprisoned. So they refuse to eat, hoping that they could be treated as political prisoners, but instead they are force fed with a tube which passes through the nose.
The terrifying fact is that all of this really happened.
A part of a dialogue catches my attention:
Maud: “If I got the vote…”
Sonny: “What would you do with it, Maud?”
Maud: “Do the same that do you, Sonny. Exercise my rights”
This is the moment
when Maud realises that life can be different, but she also realises that it
would be hard to change the mentality of people, to show them the importance of
equality. Why do you want to vote? You are mothers and wives, what else do you want to be? These are some questions that some of men could have asked to suffragettes.
It is not only the right to vote, but the right to be considered at the same level of men: the right to study, to have a just salary, to keep their children and so many other rights which were denied to them.
So they made a revolution, because the actual state of things was wrong and they knew there would be a better tomorrow. "Never surrender, never give up the fight" could be a slogan used even nowadays: the path is not concluded, there are many parts of the world where rights aren't respected, so it's fundamental to keep on fighting pacifically and join together, because only if we are together we can change what must be changed.
See you soon
Yours, Silvia
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