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.