In our own backyard

THE movie begins with the butchering of a goat.

A somber little girl named Sahira watches with curiosity as a group of adult men at a Southern California farm hold down the frightened animal and slice open its neck.

When we next meet Sahira, she is 23, vivacious, confident, living at home with her close-knit Muslim family in a quiet Riverside suburb. A med student, she appears to be on a successful career track and even has a new boyfriend -- her first real experience with love -- a tall, good-looking med student who is white, and also outside her faith. Her strict, Egyptian-born father disapproves.

This portrait of immigration and assimilation quietly sets the stage for what may be one of the most controversial movies of the year: “Beyond Honor” ultimately addresses the human drama that unfolds when Sahira is forced to undergo female genital mutilation on the orders of her father, who sees it as a way to restore the family’s honor. In the film’s most harrowing scene, Sahira is held down on her own bed as women in veils perform the crude operation.

Written and directed by Varun Khanna, the film is likely to leave audiences angry, upset and, critics fear, reinforce stereotypes about Muslims in general and Muslim men in particular.

The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million women each year -- many of them in Africa -- suffer the physical and psychological trauma of female genital mutilation, known as FGM. But what makes this movie especially disturbing to U.S. audiences is that the act doesn’t occur in some far-off land, but in a house in the United States that could be on any suburban street.

The film opens Friday at the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills after opening March 17 in New York City for a one-week run. It premiered two years ago at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and has since been shown at selected festivals, including in Newport Beach and Mumbai, India.

The filmmakers, who are both Americans of South Asian descent, say that wherever “Beyond Honor” has been shown audiences have been so moved that they either leave the theater in tears or sit numbed into silence as the end credits roll.

“A lot of men walk out and are very stone-faced,” said Mirelly Taylor, the Mexican-born actress who plays Sahira. (That is her screen name; she appears in the credits under her legal name, Ruth Osuna). “Women just sit there and they don’t move. Or, one by one, they get up and walk out with tears in their eyes.”

But even before the film opens in L.A., it is already generating concern among some Muslims who fear that it will unfairly link Islam to the practice and perpetuate the image of Muslim men as controlling and violent. They add that the movie also fails to accurately portray that FGM is typically performed on younger females.

“The idea of a case like this, the forcible circumcision of an adult woman, is kind of like a freak crime,” said Dr. Laila al-Marayati, a gynecologist who practices in Pacoima and spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based Muslim Women’s League, who stressed that she has not seen the film but was commenting upon a description provided to her by a reporter.

“As a physician, I see violence from people from all backgrounds,” she said. “Films like this re-enforce negative stereotyping and erroneously associate FGM with Islam,” adding that some Americans will see the film and come away thinking, “Crazy Muslims -- not only do they blow themselves up, look what they do to their women.”

On its website, the World Health Organization estimates that between 100 million and 140 million girls and women have undergone FGM. It notes that the ritual occurs mostly in 28 African countries, although instances have been seen in Asia and the Middle East and are increasingly found in Europe, Australia, Canada and even the U.S., primarily among immigrants.

Last June, two Southern California residents were sentenced to federal prison terms as a result of an FBI sting operation in which one of the defendants offered to perform the circumcisions in a series of e-mail exchanges, phone calls and visits to his home by an undercover agent. The U.S. Justice Department said the case was the first case filed under the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act of 1995, which outlawed the circumcision or removal of certain sexual organs of girls under the age of 18 unless it is necessary for the health of the patient, and only if it is performed by a licensed medical practitioner.

There are various reasons given for the practice, from the psychosexual (to promote chastity and virginity before marriage and fidelity during marriage) to sociological, hygienic and religious. The World Health Organization notes that while FGM is largely a cultural practice, it is sometimes held out as an Islamic practice. In fact, the organization says, the procedure predates that religion.

The filmmaker defended his decision to set his story in a Muslim family. “I think it is easy for someone to say this is an anti-Arab or anti-Muslim thing,” he said. “That is why I say it’s a social practice, not a religious one.”

Khanna, a Hindu, said he got the idea for his movie after reading a small news clipping about FGM in 1999.

“I had never heard of it ever until that day,” he recalled. “It almost devastated me that we can do this to our women. That night, I think around midnight or past midnight, I told my wife ‘I got an idea for a film and this is the idea.’ She goes, ‘Write it.’ I didn’t start writing it until about a year later. What I discovered in my research was the psychological trauma -- along with the physical trauma -- that women go through is enormous.”

Dr. Harkeerat S. Dhillon, a Riverside orthopedic and hand surgeon and Sikh who produced the film with Khanna, said the female circumcision depicted in the movie is not so much a “religious thing” but a result of a male-dominated culture. He said people like Sahira’s father “exist in a time warp.”

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Film fledglings

WHEN it debuted at the Palm Springs Film Festival, a reviewer for Variety wrote: “Though it can’t hide occasionally crude dramatics, [the film] is an undeniably bold and daring tragedy” and added that despite its low budget, “Beyond Honor” is a “good-looking film.”

Evoking strong emotions among audiences is quite an accomplishment for any filmmaker, but this is the first feature film for both men.

Khanna, 39, was born in Calcutta, grew up in Mumbai, and now lives in Culver City. He studied theater at Ohio State University. He later worked as a news anchor for a U.S.-based India cable TV station.

It was while on a news assignment that he happened to meet Dhillon, who he would later ask to produce his film. Dhillon, 50, and other investors put up more than $500,000 to make the movie. He also has a bit role in the film as a med teacher.

A member of the UC Riverside board of trustees, Dhillon confessed that before embarking on “Beyond Honor” he knew nothing about being a producer beyond a love of films and his experience as founder and president of the Riverside International Film Festival. He hastily read every book on the subject, including “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Filmmaking” by Joanne Parrent. “That’s one of the best books [on filmmaking] that I think exists,” he observed with a smile.

Besides, he figured, since Khanna had a script in hand and a director of photography to assist him behind the camera, what more did a producer need? As it turned out, plenty.

They would spend four months casting the movie. Then, on the first day of filming, one of the two cameras broke down. That was “no fun,” Dhillon recalled. The crew scrambled, managing to find a camera available on the East Coast.

The film was shot in Riverside over a period of 24 days in 2002, using such locations as the UCR campus, the medical clinic where Dhillon works, and a house belonging to Wadie Andrawis, who plays the father in the movie.

In the film, the father runs his family with an iron fist. His wife (Laurel Melagrano) is an American who married into her husband’s faith. Their 17-year-old son (Ryan Izay) longs for his father’s approval. And then there is Sahira, a woman bursting with life and possibilities and growing more Americanized by the day -- a prospect that her father cannot abide.

“I think it was one of the few roles of a lifetime you get to play that you’re never going to experience again,” Taylor said. “[The role] was so much fun, but also very difficult. I had to go places I didn’t think I could go.”

Taylor, whose acting career includes a supporting role opposite Elizabeth Hurley and Matthew Perry in the film “Serving Sara” and a recent episode of the CBS series “Numb3rs,” said she had to audition “about 12 times” before landing the part of Sahira.

Her take on Sahira: “She is, to me, a beautiful character that has to endure so much.... She has the whole world ahead of her. But she makes a mistake. She dates a Caucasian guy, and that is forbidden.”

To prepare for her role, Taylor donned conservative Muslim clothing, covering almost everything but her hands, and ventured out into Los Angeles. “People were really not nice,” she recalled. “I got a lot of mean looks and gestures, a lot of whispering behind my back.” In one convenience store, she said, “people would yell profanities and say, ‘Go back to your country.’ ”

“It was Varun’s plan from the beginning to school the cast, especially me, on female genital mutilation and what exactly they do,” Taylor said.

The tears she cries in the movie are real, she said. “I put myself in that situation. If you even, for a brief moment, empathize with somebody like Sahira, and recognize what she has to go through, it brings you to tears.”