Kate Ryan Brewer’s “Knots: A Forced Marriage Story” is one disturbing, though important, documentary, one that grows increasingly unsettling as three articulate and intelligent young women matter-of-factly recount their belittling, exploitive, and ultimately dehumanizing experiences in forced marriages. Mercifully each has escaped and forged successful, independent lives; one has become a recognized outspoken activist on behalf of victims.
The filmmakers assert that the practice of arranged marriages, often involving brides who are 15 or younger, continues almost unchecked and unchallenged. In fact, the only states that require the marrying parties to be at least 18 are Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. Between 2000 and 2010, nearly 250,000 children in the U.S. were married, and 77 per cent were young girls married off to much older men. In some cases they were forced to marry their rapists in order to salvage their reputations and the family’s honor.
Knots: A Forced Marriage Story Sneak Peek
Knots: A Forced Marriage Story is being released Friday and we have a sneak peek. Check it out below!
Global Digital Releasing has acquired director Kate Brewerâs award-winning documentary, Knots : A Forced Marriage Story.
The film explores forced and child marriages, which are occurring legally across the United States every day.
Brewer reveals the disturbing truth about this problem in modern America through the complicated experience of three forced marriage survivors. Nina Van Harn, Sara Tasneem, and Fraidy Reiss share intimate details of their personal journeys of surviving, escaping and ultimately becoming powerful voices in the historic fight to end the human rights abuse of forced marriage.
American women who were forced into arranged marriages detail abuse and rape they suffered at the hands of their husbands - as one recalls her spouse being given CUSTODY of her because she was just 15 when they wed in cult ceremony
A new documentary, Knots: A Forced Marriage Story, explores the issue of forced marriages in the US and shares the story of three women
Nina Van Harn was brought up in a conservative Christian community in Michigan and forced to marry a stranger at age 19
New Yorker Fraidy Reiss had never been alone with her Orthodox Jewish husband before she was married off to him at age 19