Beyond Belief

A good documentary should leave you unhinged.

It could blow your mind by exposing a new culture, or uncovering the the unfamiliar in your own. Maybe it strikes an emotional chord, reverberating in a dusty, forgotten recess of your heart. Maybe it confirms something you always knew but never considered closely enough.

You should watch Beyond Belief . It will do all of these things, and it will unhinge you.

The film tells the story of two women, Susan Retik and Patti Quigley, suburban moms from Massachusetts whose husbands were killed in the planes that hit the towers on September 11. Both women were pregnant at the time. The documentary delves deeply and intimately into their grief, showing the endlessness of the heartache that follows the unfathomable death of a loved one.

But what makes Beyond Belief so remarkable is how Retik and Quigley transform their sadness into a cross-cultural journey to help the widows in Afghanistan, who have suffered through decades of war and a lifetime of oppression. Retik and Quigley founded Beyond the 11th, a foundation to raise money to support Afghan widows by providing them with chickens, coops, and incubators. With such simple tools, women can feed their families, and forge some economic independence by selling the eggs. With the money they make, most send their children to school.

You'll follow Quigley and Retik on their trip to Afghanistan, a country which before 9/11, Retik confesses she couldn't have found on a map. You'll watch as they realize the remote country is inextricably linked to their own, and the universality of the grief they find there. The warmth with which they are received, and the candor with which the Afghan women tell their stories of loss and hardship will leave you both wildly hopeful and devastatingly discouraged.

More than half a million women in Afghanistan are trapped in cycles of poverty, because they are illiterate, economically disenfranchised, and the sole caretakers for their children. (In Afghan culture, if widows remarry, their children must go to the deceased father's family. Women stay single in order to stay with their children.)

This is a must-see movie. It will reveal the nuanced, painful truth behind the triumphant headlines of Al-Qaeda captures and little girls going to school. It will remind you to look for the human faces that are all too often left out of war coverage. It will make you feel guilty for forgetting them in the first place, and implore you never to forget them again.

(image from: http://www.principlepictures.com/beyondbelief)