Motley’s Law

Who said that James Bond-like spies and evil-con­quer­ing super­heroes don’t belong in doc­u­men­taries? Kim­ber­ley Mot­ley doesn’t have a license to kill, she has a license to lit­i­gate. In Afghanistan. She doesn’t have super­pow­ers but she’s def­i­nite­ly a mem­ber of the Jus­tice League. She is an Amer­i­can woman, wife and moth­er. No need to explain fur­ther why doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Nicole Nielsen Horanyi thought that Mot­ley would make a good subject.

Reg­u­lar Tal­iban attacks dur­ing the film­ing make this a valu­able doc­u­ment. It also cap­tures Motley’s dai­ly acts of defi­ance. Motley’s Law sim­ply fol­lows the dai­ly rou­tine of this aston­ish­ing woman. The moments of direct inter­ac­tion with the cam­era are rare, but Horanyi finds oth­er ways to make her talk. Whether it’s by film­ing the inter­views Mot­ley gives to mag­a­zines or by wit­ness­ing when she argues in court, we always get the feel­ing that we’re right at the heart of the issues at hand. This non-fic­tion sto­ry tack­les sev­er­al sub­jects, from the expe­ri­ence of being a female lawyer fac­ing an infor­mal kind of jus­tice sys­tem in which Sharia laws are just as impor­tant as laws estab­lished by the gov­ern­ment, to the Amer­i­can pres­ence in Afghanistan and gun con­trol in the Unit­ed States.

All these issues are beau­ti­ful­ly con­nect­ed through the pow­er­ful imagery: wide shots of Kab­ul and its inhab­i­tants are enough to give us an overview of the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. Play­ing over these scenes is the track ​‘6 Foot 7 Foot’ by Lil Wayne, prepar­ing us to fol­low Mot­ley ​“on hol­i­day” in the US to see her hus­band and chil­dren. The tran­si­tions between the two coun­tries are vio­lent for both Mot­ley and the view­er. We flip from from fire­works to fire­bombs. Extracts of speech­es by Barack Oba­ma are insert­ed at strate­gic moments, often show­ing the gap between what we read the news and grim real­i­ty in the field.

What’s most inter­est­ing is that the film doesn’t paint an ide­al­is­tic pic­ture of human rights lawyers, it sim­ply is an inspi­ra­tional jour­ney. From the begin­ning we learn that Mot­ley first came to Afghanistan for mon­ey – she doesn’t only argue women rights cas­es because, ​“it doesn’t pay the bills”. But Horanyi man­ages to show her fool­proof human­i­ty and prag­ma­tism towards the dan­ger of the sit­u­a­tion at any time. And that is wor­thy of super­hero status.