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At just 14 years old, Asal has accepted a marriage proposal from a medical student with the blessing of her father. It’s young but, in Iran, not extraordinary for such an arrangement, where a fifth of all marriages are child marriages, with at least one person under 18. And so, naturally, each member of Asal’s family – including a constellation of her aunts and uncles – has their own opinion on the decision. With a non-judgmental eye, the UK-based Iranian filmmaker Elahe Esmaili captures their overlapping, contradictory and sometimes even self-contradictory opinions on the arrangement in her award-winning short documentary The Doll. Asal is excited about her engagement, but is it a decision that this girl, whose fiancé wooed her with gifts of sweets and dolls, could ever be expected to make responsibly? Does pairing so young make the marriage destined to fail, as has been the case for many of her family members, including her 35-year-old father? Will it interfere with her studies? By letting the cameras roll and allowing the family members to opine, Esmaili skilfully unfurls a complex tale of family, patriarchy and young womanhood.
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Wellbeing
Through a poetic account of childhood trauma, one woman reclaims her past
28 minutes
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Politics and government
‘Without a poster, you don’t exist!’ – on the curious political banners of Mumbai
20 minutes
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Earth science and climate
A biologist on the sorrows of documenting the Great Salt Lake’s collapse
6 minutes
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Film and visual culture
The old-time cinema experience endures in a quiet corner of Japan
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Gender and identity
‘I didn’t fall in love with a couple of body pieces’ – on marriage and transition
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Sports and games
The brutality and beauty of the West African martial art of ‘dambe’
15 minutes
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Animals and humans
What happened when one woman raised an abandoned squirrel as her own
8 minutes
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The future
What’s the healthiest way to handle a creeping feeling that the world is ending?
15 minutes
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy
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3 minutes