Salma

At age 13, Salma, a young Muslim girl living in a village in south India, was locked in a small room with one tiny window and not allowed to leave. Several years later, her parents married her off, and she moved to live with her husband’s family. They locked her up as well. Her crime? Being an intelligent woman. She was thought too ambitious, too rebellious to stay in her home willingly. During her 25 years of captivity, Salma wrote bits of poetry on scraps of paper, smuggling them out to a sympathetic reader and eventually to a publisher. Her story is told in Salma, the documentary by filmmaker Kim Longinotto.

”Her purpose was to have a son, that’s it; that’s all she was supposed to do,” Cressandra Thibodeaux, executive director of 14 Pews, where the film is screening, tells us. Instead, Salma eventually became a celebrated Tamil poet known worldwide. Longinotto follows Salma as she returns to her village, to her home, in an effort to save other young girls from the same fate she suffered. ”The fact that she’s so unemotional about it, that she just says, ‘Yes, this was the window I looked out of,’ and ‘Yes, this is the room I lived in.’ That makes it all the more powerful,” says Thibodeaux.

Members of Shunya Theatre, a Houston-based Indian theater troupe, will read Salma’s poetry after the screening.

6:30 p.m. 800 Aurora. For information, call 281-888-9677 or visit 14pews.org. Free to $10.

Sun., Aug. 11, 6:30 p.m., 2013