Yasmin Javed is showing the camera childhood photos of her daughter Fawziyah, from beautiful baby to toddler who can hardly keep still to grinning child with huge shining eyes. “Sorry,” says Yasmin, gathering them up. “I can’t do any more.” Fawziyah, an only child, grew up, fulfilled her ambition to become a lawyer – there are graduation photos, too – and died two years ago at the age of 31, while 17 weeks pregnant with her first child. “The life I had, that’s gone, that’s finished,” says Yasmin, whose face and body seems carved out of grief. Even more than the photographs, the footage of the family holidays, the beaming selfies taken with friends and family, it is Yasmin’s stricken stillness that gives the measure of the loss.
The Push tells Fawziyah’s story as it follows the trial of the man accused of pushing her to her death from the rocky summit of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh – her husband Kashif Anwar. “As the trial starts,” the film’s interviewer asks Yasmin, “what’s going through your mind?” “Hate,” says Yasmin, without heat. “Hatred for him.”
