AllMovie

At the age of eleven, Yemenite Amina al-Tuhaif was married in an arranged union to a man many years her senior, and at fourteen she was sentenced to death when a court found her guilty of murdering her husband. Amina, however, has strongly argued her innocence, insisting that her husband was strangled by his cousin, who was having an affair with him and warned Amina that she would be implicated in the crime if she went to the police. Tried for the murder without proper legal representation, Amina was scheduled for execution in 2002 (when she would be old enough to be hanged under Yemen's laws), but by the time her date with the hangman arrived, she was pregnant after being raped by a prison guard. The prison staff responded by pushing her execution forward to 2005 (by which time her child would no longer be breast-feeding), while her family cut off all contact with her, insisting the rape had brought shame to her mother and father. Khadija Al-Salami, an award-winning filmmaker from Yemen, became aware of Amina's tragic story through newspaper reports, and began conducting interviews with the young woman while visiting her in prison. Amina is a documentary drawn from their conversations, which uses Amina's story as an example of the legal and societal abuses heaped upon Arabic women, as well as telling the story of a girl who has struggled to survive in the face of overwhelming odds. Amina was screened in competition at the 2006 Dubai Film Festival.