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Germany 2005
Running Time: 43 Min. / 60 Min.
Born into one of the most affluent and powerful families of Pakistan,
raised with an awareness of her status and position, educated in western
elite universities Benazir Bhutto was elected as the first woman to
be head of government of an Islamic country in 1988. But while her
development seems continuous and consequent, her life was fraught
with problems and shaped by tragic. Only after her father, the former
head of state Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed by the military ruler
General Zia ul-Haq in April 1979, she decided to run herself for government
in her home country Pakistan. She managed to succeed twice and now
she is trying for a third time.
Philip Selkirk’s documentary traces the biography of Benazir
Bhutto and depicts the permanent feud of the “daughter of power”
with the powerful establishment of her own country. In Selkirk’s
film, Benazir Bhutto describes her route to the head of her country,
she speaks about the humiliations and persecutions that she and her
family had to suffer under the rule of Zia ul-Haq as well as under
today’s military regime of General Pervez Musharraf and she
gives us a nightmarish impression about the many years of military
rule in Pakistan.
In a frank interview, the director Philip Selkirk manages to speak
to the former premier also about her misjudgements, her failures,
the accusations of corruption against her and her husband and about
the fact that many experts of the country have been calling her ‘The
Mother of the Taliban’. Other interviewees in the film are people
whose lives were in one way or the other influenced by Bhutto, such
as friends, advisors and former officers of the secret services as
well as people like followers and opponents.
With the help of rarely seen footage from the film archive of the
Pakistan People’s Party, Philip Selkirk manages to document
the fascinating history of Benazir Bhutto without gap from her childhood
to the present.
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