In ‘Nikah’: An astonishing portrait of Uyghur life on the edge of erasure, Darren Byler introduces a film about a traditional Uyghur wedding rite that has been banned in Xinjiang:
The story on the surface is a simple one. Two daughters in their twenties, Dilber and Rena, are caught between their own ambitions — careers, travel, love — and community pressures to follow gendered norms dictating what young women should do, whom they should get married to, and the life path of a wife and mother. After the younger sister, Rena, is married to a young man in the community, the pressure builds on the older sister, Dilber, to marry as well — or be lost to old age or, more ominously, as whispers imply, be married off to a Han man.
In 2017, the Chinese state criminalized much of what is portrayed in the film as signs of religious extremism. Drawing on one of the world’s broadest counterterrorism laws and a mandate from Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, police and civil servants began to use face-recognition video surveillance, informants, and torture to “round up those that needed to be rounded up.” Dilber and Rena — plus other characters portrayed in the film — are exactly whom that mandate was for. As viewers, we are placed on the precipice of the largest mass internment of a religious minority since World War II.
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