Women Behind the Wheel is a new documentary produced and created by Hannah Congdon and Catherine Haigh, two film-makers who filmed themselves traversing the Pamir Highway - the second-highest highway in the world - on a 3,000km loop that takes them through the predominantly Muslim republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Their goal? To meet and talk with the women who lived there and learn about their lives.
The production premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, three years after Congdon and Haigh won the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s 2019 Works in Progress Award for their initial pitch.
Over their two months on the road, they met countless women, and the dozen or so stories here represent a fraction of their overall experience. We get a small amount of context in terms of the history of the Soviet Union, and how its collapse left some of these isolated villages in a state of profound disrepair.
We meet a zookeeper who has tended to the animals for eleven years, and carved a niche for herself, but had to give her children to the orphanage because she had no means to look after them; her work is not remunerated or supported the way the effort of a male peer would be. It’s a recurring theme.
‘Women here aren’t taught their value,’ one subject says, and we feel that sentiment echo palpably across the various lives we encounter. It’s not for lack of ingenuity or effort, but rather an inescapable expectation that women’s role in society is first and foremost to look after their husbands, homes, and children. Whether the woman Haigh and Congdon are speaking to is a Taekwondo World Champion, a woman who is the primary breadwinner of her family, or one who is a pillar of her community, they will speak about struggling to balance achievements with first and foremost doing all the housework, all the childcare. That this burden must fall squarely on their shoulders is unquestionable.
Culturally, it seems it would be beyond the pale, to both men and women, to question these gender roles at their roots. The sense of saving ‘face’ - or protecting one’s honour and morality - is clearly extremely important in these communities, but overwhelmingly, women seem to pay the price for these values.
In a lot of these profoundly remote areas, the land is so inhospitable in the long wintertime that there is only work for the men for two or three months of the year. Many need to work abroad in Russia for the remainder of the time, leaving communities run almost entirely by women. Yet, this prevailing atmosphere of patriarchy remains.
And beyond stunted or complicated ambitions, there are darker consequences. In some of the cities the filmmakers visit, domestic violence is widely accepted as the norm. The barbaric practice of ‘bride kidnapping’ - forced marriage by abduction - is prevalent, and treated with a sense of inevitability by a ‘traditional’ older generation. Hard-won societal change is happening across the region, mostly via the work and resistance of industrious older women creating community hubs to educate and empower the next generation, and small but powerful acts of tenacity and self-determination - learning how to drive, one woman teaching her peers' beekeeping as a way to make their own income.
What is interesting about Women Behind the Wheel is there isn’t really a central narrative. Most documentaries seem driven by the story they are capturing, this one performed a sort of trust fall: show up and a story will present itself. Did it? Yes and no. I found I wanted more reaction and discussion between the two filmmakers. You never really get their feelings or thoughts on what they’ve encountered beyond ‘Wow, that was an impressive woman’ ad nauseam. I understand the desire for an unbiased, fly-on-the-wall approach, but given that the finished product of the documentary is compressed from hundreds of hours of footage, we are already seeing the experience filtered through their own values and opinions.
We don’t find out any galvanizing reason why the documentarians felt the need to undertake this major, multi-month expedition, or much about their relationship with feminism, or for that matter, with each other. This struck me as a missed opportunity to enrich and entwine the disparate stories they encounter. When the journey finally ends, it’s a tad anti-climatic.
That said, the stories are continuously compelling, and I felt engaged throughout the ninety-minute runtime. I didn’t want it to end and despite the darkness of the material, there’s plenty of triumph of the human spirit and moments of pure joy on display. I finished it feeling uplifted and inspired. It’s doubtlessly a compassionate and non-judgemental look at past and present life in Central Asia, and it made me want to learn more about the region and the lives of women there - making it well worth a watch.