As the Pankisi Women’s Story film is taking shape within the post-production process in Seattle, international interest in the film and the Pankisi Women’s Stories Project  http://pankisistories.weebly.com/  is continuing to mount.

Cristina M. Cocan, in her very beautiful blog about the North Caucasus region has written about the Pankisi Gorge and included many gorgeous photos of Pankisi at http://thenorthcaucasus.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/pankisi/. She is interested in seeing the film and linking it to her blog when it is available. Her blog has had more than 100,000 hits.

Fabrizio Terranova, an internationally known film-maker from Belgium,  http://www.aninsaneportrait.us/index.php?/film/movie/ and http://www.aninsaneportrait.us/index.php?/film/trailers/ has expressed an interest in the project and the film, and offered to show it in Belgium and link it to his website when it is finished.

So far we have found venues in Pankisi, Akhmeta, Telavi, Tbilisi, Kutaisi and possibly Batumi in Georgia to preview the film this Spring. Friends and family have offered to host showings in Norway and Denmark as well as several locations in the United States. The women are looking for other women’s clubs, in Georgia and in neighboring countries, especially other Muslim women’s groups, to which a group of them could travel and show the film as a calling card and introduction to themselves for possible friendship and collaboration on women’s issues throughout the region.

The women and I are very excited and grateful for this continued enthusiasm for our project and are looking forward to where the film will take us virtually or in person.

This is some of the close-up beauty of Pankisi captured by film-maker and author Miriam Ruth Black when she came to work on our film project in July.  It is true that beauty is found all throughout the Pankisi Gorge; in the faces and hearts of its people, in the lush landscapes and abundant fields, in the ruggedness of the snow-covered mountains, in the wildness of a Pankisi thunderstorm, in the caring of families for their elders, in the unconditional love the women have shown me – a stranger from the West.

But as the women and I prepared for the film project over the past 8 months, as our conversations and friendships deepened, as we trusted each other with more of our truths, I discovered some truths of life here that some Americans rarely if ever have to contemplate. Ones that are more difficult to focus on than beauty. Ones that are difficult to see at all if blinded by cultural ignorance. Ones that hurt the heart rather than fill it. Ones that are easier to ignore if they don’t directly affect us.

One of those difficult truths is the danger of telling the truth.

It appeared first in a meeting with the Women’s Council, when the women were deciding which principles they wanted to base the work of the Women’s Council on – things like mutual trust, equal rights, caring for others, peace, compassion. Then honesty and integrity came up. The women all decided these were important and wanted to include them; but they wanted to know if they really should include them when one of the women asked: “But what happens to believing in honesty and integrity when you live in a culture, in a place and time, where telling the truth can get you or your family killed or “disappeared”?”

It appeared again while filming the women’s stories. When the women asked for the cameras and microphones to be turned off so that they could finish the story they were telling, but not endanger themselves or their family members in Pankisi or those that remain in Chechnya.

And I witnessed the beauty of courage, of telling the truth; the incredible beauty and courage of the women as they told their stories. I saw the beauty that can happen when we can create safe places for others to tell their truth. The beauty of simply listening. Close up or from a distance, these acts too are beauty.

Just so you don't think the women and I have dropped off the planet, I'm writing to let you know we are all taking a short break; from work, from blogging, from e-mail. Bring our energies back home to ourselves.  Our Duisi offices were closed for Ramadan and are still closed as temperatures soar and because August is the month that many of the women go to Turkey to harvest hazelnuts for income.

As for the film, it is post-production time. A long and involved process that is what makes a film a film instead of a home movie. This is where the true artistry and technical expertise of the film-maker comes into play. The process for our film will take Patricia up to six months of, as far as I understand never having done any post-production myself, painstaking and exacting work. So the film-makers are not taking a break. This is where the film-maker looks for story-lines and themes and lines up translations and voice-overs and music with the film bites to make art and meaning out of the raw footage. This is all happening in Seattle, where Patricia and Karl live. Miriam will be traveling to Seattle this week.

We will keep you posted as to the film's progress.

My friend Ani here in Georgia has a saying she likes: "Good things happen suddenly."  That's how the filming of our Pankisi Women's Stories Project http://pankisistories.weebly.com/ felt to me this month - even though it has been more than seven months in the planning and preparing and finding support, all of a sudden it seemed July was here and the film crew arrived and we were off in a whirlwind of filming activity.

It was wonderful and intense and incredibly busy and deeply moving to see and hear the women tell their stories and answer questions about their lives. Pankisi herself was a glorious backdrop showing her many summer faces of sun, gentle breezes, wild thunderstorms with winds and light shows, lush greenness, rich fecundity, and a party dress of wildflowers to celebrate the occasion; and mask the difficult lives about which the women spoke. You will see all this in the film.

The failing infrastructure of Georgia made its appearance too, with several power outages and lost internet connectivity. Several times we thought we would run out of battery back-up for the cameras and microphones, because we had no electricity to recharge them. But each time we squeaked by and finished the day's filming.

The film crew was wonderful and unbelievably professional; skilled at capturing scenes and footage and getting the women to open up almost immediately. Their generosity to the project of donating their time and expertise to make this film for us is still unbelievable to me. A film like the one we are making and the film crew is gifting costs an average of $50,000. So this is huge! Those of you who have been supporting the women and their stories project either emotionally, energetically, or financially, can feel wonderful about what your contributions are supporting and the caliber of film that is being produced to restore a sense of dignity and place to the women of Pankisi.

And I must say the women are still in awe that the filming actually happened, was fun, and that they trusted the film-makers with their lives and secrets. I saw a sense of immediate relief and gratitude in their already beautiful faces after they told their stories, more than a relief that it was over and they did well; but a sense of something important accomplished and pride in their own participation; all of which allowed even more light to shine through. The energy was palpable that something truly important was taking place and they were part of it. Thank you for being a part of it as well; and for accompanying the women in a difficult world as this project progresses.

And then suddenly the intense 5 days of filming was over. The 20 hours of film log was reviewed and notes and observations were made. The film crew boarded their planes for the States. And this next stage of waiting begins. The editing and post-production of the film will take up to 6 months before the film is actually ready for release. Another amazing gift we have received is an offer by a composer at the University of Washington to write a soundtrack for the film using some of the original local music we recorded during filming. We here are all amazed by the way this project has spoken to so many and by the extreme generosity of so many to support the women. Thank you.

We will keep you posted as the film-making progresses.

From the women of Pankisi and from myself we give our thanks to you all!

For more pictures and an identical post, please visit my blog at http://suzerutherford.wordpress.com/2014/07/16/filming-of-pankisi-womens-stories/

The conversations with the women are beginning to deepen as the filming draws near. Today we had a wonderful talk about what they love about their traditions (the respect they have for elders, the good care they take of each other, and the sense of identity they get from their traditions and community) and what they would change about them if they had a magic wand. The latter produced a palpable sense of yearning to be seen as equal(s) to men in value and a desire to be valued by their husbands for all they do to take care of his parents and his children and his home. They wish it were not condoned to have more than one wife.

Their newest tangible wish for the women of Pankisi is a women's center where women can come and be themselves without the restriction of traditional roles and dress - a place to talk openly, read books, exercise without a scarf and long skirt, play table tennis, tell stories to each other, laugh, dream. They also said that there are many highly educated and talented women in Pankisi, but no place for them to showcase or share their talents and knowledge. The Women's Center could be such a place where at least they could share with each other.

It is such an elegant and simple wish. I hope this next year I can help them realize it. Maybe the film will somehow be a step toward realizing this simple dream? Today after our talk and after my time with my Pankisi Girls' Leadership Club (see my latest blog post: http://suzerutherford.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/pankisi-girls-leadership-club/ ), my heart is full to over-flowing and my spirits are high. These are remarkable women and girls. I can hardly wait for you to meet them in our film. Thank you all so much for your support of their dreams!

Sometimes we tell each other our stories over a cup of tea. Sometimes something that is happening in one of the villages prods a memory to come forth and a story to be told. Sometimes we watch a film together like the time we watched Where Do We Go Now?, which tells the story of a remote, isolated unnamed Lebanese village inhabited by both Muslims and and Christians, and talked about how it is similar and different from Pankisi, and what the role of women as peace builders is. 

Sometimes our preparation is more intentional - a workshop on The Power of Story as a Tool for Peace Building or the screening of Girl Rising - a documentary film which tells the stories of nine girls from around the world and the power of education to transform societies, and which uses powerful storytelling to deliver a simple, critical truth: Educate Girls and you will Change the World. Then we talked about what we want the world to know about Pankisi and its people. We made a list of questions that might elicit stories that explain our experiences and our lives, our hopes and our dreams. 

Once several women came to me and said they didn't know how to tell stories, so I invited 8 of them to sit around a table with me and I gave each a piece of paper and a pencil and we turned on some music and we doodled. Then we wrote 5 words that described our doodling to ourselves. Then I asked them each to write about their lives or something that is going on in their lives right now using all 5 words. We put the music on again and we wrote. And then from our scribbling and our writing, we each told a story. The women said it was amazing that they had known each other for years and spend much time together, but each woman's story told them something new about her; something none of them had known before. Perhaps the most amazing was the woman who is always laughing and joking, whose doodle reminded her of her mother, now dead, and who was so moved to tears that she couldn't finish her story. The other women said this is the first time any of them had ever seen her cry. And so it is that we are preparing to tell pieces of our stories; to tell others about life in a place that most have forgotten or never heard of; to tell the world that we are here. 

(Update: We're excited that we've reached our fundraising goal for the film project! Thanks to all who helped.)