Benazir Bhutto — airbrushed and sainted

A documentary, based on interviews with Benazir Bhutto's family members, friends and admirers, has failed to evoke much interest in Pakistan or among the Asian community in Britain.

Benazir Bhutto: The film on her was awarded the special jury prize for outstanding historical documentary at Sonoma International Film Festival, California.

In the weeks before her assassination, as she appeared set to return to power for a third time, Benazir Bhutto's supporters in America were trying to put together a team of lobbyists in anticipation of her victory. Mark Siege, a patrician Democrat with links to the party leadership and a close personal friend of Benazir's, was at the heart of this campaign and he had roped in another high-flying political consultant Duane Baughman who also runs a film production company.

But, on December 27, 2007, while they were still in the midst of gathering their team, Benazir was killed by a suicide bomber. Their task now, Mr. Baughman recalls, was to keep her “legacy alive” and they decided to do this by telling her “extraordinary” story through a film.

“A few months later, myself and a film crew would find ourselves sitting in Dubai in what had been Benazir's living room, listening to her three heartbroken children and her shaken widower, Asif Ali Zardari, explain why Benazir was compelled to leave her family and the safe confines of a cushy self-exile to march back into Pakistan to face death threats and a political hurricane,” he says.

The result was

Bhutto: You Can't Murder a Legacy , billed as the “first definitive documentary” on the world's first woman prime minister of a Muslim nation.

The two-hour television-style documentary, based on interviews mostly with Benazir's family members, fawning friends and admirers, created quite a buzz on the American festival circuit (it was the official entry at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the special jury prize for outstanding historical documentary at Sonoma International Film Festival, California ) but has failed to evoke much interest in Pakistan or among the Asian community in Britain where it was released last week.

From a film, with a give-away title that leaves little to imagination, you don't expect great objectivity or debate. But what you

do expect from a film that calls itself a “documentary,” won a special prize for “outstanding historical documentary,” and is claimed to be a “painstaking and methodological examination” of Pakistani politics is a semblance of credibility and a respect for an informed viewer's intelligence.

It is so crudely one-sided (one Pakistani critic called it a “product of Pakistan Peoples Party's PR machine'') that even Asif Ali Zardari comes out smelling of roses. Corruption charges? What corruption charge? He was a victim of conspiracies by his wife's political opponents, we are told simply on the basis of what he himself and his friends tell the film-maker.

The only critical voice is that of Fatima Bhutto, Benazir's estranged niece, but it is promptly countered by voices ranged against her. Benazir's younger sister, Sanam, accuses Fatima of trying to hijack the Bhutto legacy. Anyone who is not a Bhutto comes across as a conspirator, the biggest villain of the piece (after Zia-ul-Haq) being Pervez Musharraf who is virtually accused of ordering her assassination with one interviewee saying something along the lines that he didn't have to actually tell someone to “go and kill her”; it was enough for him to let it be known that he didn't care what happened to her — and someone would take the cue and do the needful.

Mr. Baughman, who has directed and produced the film with Mr. Siege, has claimed that the film's “narrative” has been vindicated by the U.N. inquiry report into Benazir's death.

“The film's narrative is unintentionally but strikingly similar to the courageous report of the United Nations released on April 15, 2010 which pointed directly to the actions of General Musharraf, his government, the police, the military and intelligence agency, and the all-powerful ‘Establishment' in Pakistan that determines not only life, but apparently death as well,” he has said.

Only genuine moments

The film's only genuine moments are when Benazir's two daughters talk about their mother. They break down as they recall their last meeting with her before she left them in Dubai to return to Pakistan. With tears in their eyes, they tell how she kept wishing them even though their birthdays were months away.

Indian viewers of a certain generation would be reminded of their own youth watching the grainy footage of a callow Benazir during her visit to India with her father in 1972. In a previously unheard tape she says she was thrilled to bits at the media attention she got; and how nervous she was when, for the first time, she wore a sari to meet Indira Gandhi.

But who was Benazir Bhutto? And how will history remember her? Was she really a martyr for democracy? A progressive political leader? A plucky feminist? A champion of “modern” Islam etc?

For anyone looking for something even approaching a clue to these questions this Bhutto is the wrong film. And that means for most of us.