Genocide, gender and Nation in Zahir Raihan’s <i>Stop Genocide</i> (1971)

In response to Pakistan’s genocidal activities in 1971 in East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh), director Zahir Raihan travelled through the war-torn countryside of his home country and recorded the dire situation in the refugee camps, resulting in his landmark documentary Stop Genocide (1971). In this paper, I am tracing the influences of Third Cinema and Brechtian theater on his filmmaking methods and argue that Raihan’s film goes beyond a mere documentation of war crimes and a call for international help: It frames genocide as a primal injustice from which a new nation emerges while simultaneously establishing a sense of community and brotherhood among Bangladeshis through a heavily gendered lens. In Stop Genocide , Female trauma becomes the focal point of a national narrative that strictly divides gender roles, portraying women as victims to a national injury and men as valiant defenders of both the nation and the honor of their women.