Films That Explored Religious Abuses Won Big at the Academy Awards

Photo credit: Kerry Hayes/Open Road Films

By Hemant Mehta

Tonight’s winners at the 88th annual Academy Awards included a couple of films that exposed the worst practices within certain religious communities.

Spotlight, the film about Boston Globe reporters who uncovered the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, took home awards for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

The film is remarkable, not just for its realistic look at a newsroom, but for taking the subject matter so seriously. You can’t watch that movie without feeling anger and shock at just how widespread the Catholic cover-up was.

But perhaps the most understated win came in the category of Best Documentary Short. It went to Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy for her film A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness — a movie about faith-based honor killings.

As the New York Times describes it, the film is:

…an enlightening exploration of the Pakistani culture that allows and even encourages honor killing. In this account of an 18-year-old woman who disobeys her family by eloping with a man from a lower class without permission, she is shot in the face by her father and uncle, thrown into a river and left to drown. Miraculously she survives. All the principals are interviewed.

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