Knots: A Forced Marriage Story

Interesting topic and interesting women and their stories. All in all a fine documentary, but the endless clips off a young woman with a red string - dancing around in an artful way - was just too much. For me it took away from the seriousness of the movie and made it feel like an art project - striving to be oh so creative. Those clips began to annoy me so much that I almost couldn't digest what the women were telling and how serious it was - it made it hard for me to get through the whole thing and that's really bad because it is really an important topic and I feel bad that these women's stories get made into some sort of artistic expression project.

This film tells the story of three survivors of forced marriage in America. Fraidy Reiss is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish teen from Brooklyn who was coerced into marrying an abusive man. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Nina Van Harn's Christian father forced her to marry a man he chose for her. And in California, Sara Tasneem was just fifteen when she was kidnapped by her father and forced to marry a 28-year-old man. Even today, forced marriage cuts across state lines, ages, religions and social strata. Even worse, they are occurring legally across the United States every day. In November 2019, Kate Ryan Brewer presented a TEDx Omaha talk on the subject of forced and child marriage in the United States and recently spoke at the 65th U. N. Commission on the Status of Women. Knots is her first feature film. This is an eye-opener of a film and proves that no matter how far we feel society has progressed, we still have so much more work to do.