Looking back at the film as an Arab woman yourself, does it still ring true?
It rings true in the sense that I read a story just a few weeks ago about a father who has recently returned to Kuwait from, I think he was studying in a university in Saudi Arabia. [He had] heard a rumor that his 14-year-old daughter was no longer a virgin and slit her throat without even asking, and tests afterwards proved that she was still a virgin. So in [the] sense that honor killings are a huge problem in the Arab world, it does ring true. It is said that the Saudis found the film insulting in a way a Westerner would probably never be able to understand. Explain that. I have a hard time understanding it myself to say that only we can understand why this is embarrassing, because when a government uses that kind of excuse to chastise criticism, it just feeds into the continuing oppression of women, because it uses all these arguments about tradition and customs and “You don’t understand our culture.” But what kind of culture allows you to drag a woman into the street and shoot her
