“Dying to Divorce” begins and ends with an onscreen counter, ticking over as rapidly as a zealous taxi meter — if only it were measuring anything so banal. Instead, it’s a representation of Turkey’s appalling rate of femicide over recent years, the screen below the counter filling up with the names of women murdered by their partners, as the number above queasily rises. The point is made solemnly as the screen fades away before reaching a total. Examining the country’s culture of patriarchal violence and weighing it up against the systemic rot that allows it to fester, British docmaker Chloë Fairweather’s plainspoken debut feature has a lot to take on in an 80-minute timeframe, and if it doesn’t manage to complete all its arguments, that doesn’t diminish the power of a film about a crucially unresolved problem.
Though it’s a British production — and duly entered as the U.K.’s international Oscar submission — “Dying to Divorce” largely avoids a journalistic outsider’s view, instead embedding itself in the cultural and political particularities of Turkish society. Fairweather’s way into her film’s daunting subject is via the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, a Turkish activist collective that also collaborates in the court cases surrounding victims and survivors of domestic violence. We are told that 1 in 3 Turkish women have experienced abuse by their partner, which is the highest rate in economically developed countries. This makes it difficult for them to do the right thing.
Through the Platform, we encounter the film’s three principal human subjects — two of them survivors ensnared in ugly legal battles, one a defiant lawyer fighting their corner. It is difficult and engrossing to watch the testimonies of former subjects. Kubra was introduced with archive footage of her past life as a Bloomberg TV reporter. Arzu was also disabled by her husband, after being shot at close range in each of her limbs when she filed for divorce. Both women are facing significant obstacles to bringing their attackers before the Turkish justice system, as well as securing custody of their children.
Their horror stories aren’t even exceptional in the professional routine of Ipek Bozkurt, a lawyer specializing in cases involving women’s rights — who serves the film as both a warmly empathetic ally and a jaded teller of hard, ugly truths. “Dying to Divorce”It tries to achieve a similar balance from its own perspective, finding small spots of optimism in its portrayal of feminist rallies in communities and modest, but inevitably compromised legal victories.
Fairweather isn’t out to sugarcoat the proceedings with false cheer. The more we zoom out to see the bigger picture, the bleaker it gets, particularly as the film pivots from the victims’ individual narratives to a more generalized view of Turkish institutional corruption. An extended passage is dedicated to the country’s 2017 constitutional referendum, the specious outcome of which gave the incumbent government greater unchecked power — a blow to activists like Bozkurt pushing against the odds for progressive legal reform. The film’s micro-to-macro shifts in focus aren’t entirely smooth. Viewers less familiar with Turkey’s political landscape are left to surmise the trickle-down effect of systemic changes or stasis. The progress of Kubra and Arzu’s gripping court battles has been tightly condensed in the edit, and “Dying to Divorce”It could withstand a longer duration and more detailed procedures.
Even where the film wavers structurally, however, its emotional impact is consistent, driven home by the courageous candor of its participants — the survivors most of all, of course, but also their champions and families, including the few men in their corner. One of the film’s most moving interviews is with Urzu’s formerly conservative father, as he admonishes himself for permitting her marriage at just 14 years of age, to the man who nearly killed her. “I ruined the lives of my children just to keep with tradition,”He is open to admitting it. Although new traditions are not yet established in the Turkish patriarchy, this little bit of self-awareness may be a step towards them.