Motley’s Law
MOTLEY'S LAW is an award winning documentary that follows the extraordinary story of Kimberley Motley, an audacious, tough- as-nails African-American / Korean former beauty queen and mother who is the first and only Western litigation lawyer in Kabul, Afghanistan. As she vows to fight within the Afghan legal system and defend vulnerable clients amidst great sacrifice and dangerous circumstances including her own assassination, she must also struggle to balance the needs of her family a world away in the U.S.
MOTLEY’S LAW is also instructive in that it captures Motley’s interaction and training with attorneys, judges, students, and legal practitioners in an instruction on her practice of law which includes demonstrating client and witness interviewing, litigation techniques, written legal practices in Afghanistan and international jurisdictions with an emphasis on understanding and analyzing human behavior through cultural, environmental, geographic, social, religious, environmental and economic perspectives
Watch the 2 minute movie trailer.
'I grew up in a bad neighborhood and Kabul is just another bad neighborhood'
The last international troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014. 38-year old Kimberley Motley has left her husband and her three kids in USA, to work as a defense lawyer in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the only foreign lawyer, with a license to work in Afghan courts, not to mention, the only woman. With her afghan assistant Khalil, Kimberley defends western and afghan clients, accused of criminal offenses. Money and prestigious human rights cases has motivated her for five years, but the personal threats and the dangerous conditions in the country, makes it harder and harder for Kimberley to continue her work.
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In this jarring, up-close depiction, the filmmakers throw us into Motley's world as she handles physical threats, bullying bureaucrats and the constant male/religious chauvinism of the local culture.
She indeed has the superwoman mindset, which she fortifies with tenacity, humor and the sagacity to work the system, which, in the case of Afghanistan, is dysfunctional and dangerous.
Motley is fearless, but she's also endearing; she's not an abrasive personality or a crusading egocentric as one might expect from a person who puts herself in harm's way in a land to which she has no personal attachment.
She's also refreshingly non-P.C.: She has little patience with what she considers an ineffectual U.S. Embassy, as well as the "bitches" from pompous women's groups who live for congratulatory coverage in The New York Times.
Under Horanyi's brave, incisive direction, Motley's Law wins in viewer appeal. Special kudos to Kristian Eidnes Andersen's edgy music, stirring the story with a tense Z-like foreboding.
The longer Motley remains in Afghanistan, the more she gets involved in pro bono human-rights work, which she enjoys, though she notes, “It doesn’t pay the bills.” Horanyi follows her on visits to women’s prisons and juvenile detention facilities, where she dispenses free advice and offers to take on cases, when not refused access by uptight Afghan bureaucrats. Her paid work requires her to confront lazy, corrupt and ignorant officials every day, and Motley is not a woman to suffer fools lightly. No wonder she says that her blood pressure shoots up the second she returns to Afghanistan. (She tells her translator, Khalil, and her driver, Khadr, that they are part of “the Justice League,” a reference that seems to get somewhat lost in translation.)