Film about oppression of women in the Caucasus sparks excitement in social media

Social network users have criticized Alexei Pivovarov's project after the release of a film about the situation with women's rights in Northern Caucasus. The authors of the film have presented the region to the audience one-sidedly and made rough generalizations, local residents believe.

Alexei Pivovarov, the former editor-in-chief of the RTVi TV Channel, has launched the "Editorial Board" project on the YouTube. The author of the film, Karina Mukhutdinova, has called Northern Caucasus "one of the most confined Russian regions, where it is very difficult to get into real life of it."

The heroines of the film are women from Kabardino-Balkaria, Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya. One of them, Nina, said that when she was about eight years old, she was circumcised.

The film also raises the topics of honour killings, forced and early marriages, polygamy, and the peculiarities of family relations.

"It feels like I was shown a completely different Dagestan, a terrible, filled with female suffering," Makhach Abdulaev, a Dagestani blogger, wrote on the Facebook.

He has added that the author is trying to create from Dagestan some "an exclusion zone where laws do not work, men easily kill their wives and sisters, and a woman is a downtrodden creature who, at the age of 14, is married off to a sadist who already has several wives."

Some commentators have recalled the resonant story of Madina Umaeva, a resident of Chechnya, who shocked them by the fact that the girl's mother had to apologize for the words about her daughter's violent death.

In June 2020, human rights defenders called critical the situation with women's rights in Northern Caucasus, noting that traditions there are conducive to violence against women in the family.