Synopsis
Sixteen Decisions is filmed in an experimental style, skipping between past, present, and future to follow the life of a teenager named Selina. A sixteen-year-old mother of two, Selina lives a life typical for poor women in Bangladesh. She was a child laborer at the age of seven, married at the age of twelve, and had her first child at the age of thirteen. Her family sold their land to pay her dowry, and when her father lost his sight, they were left beggars. The $60 loan she receives from Grameen Bank allows her to put the down payment on a bicycle rickshaw and buy chickens whose eggs she can sell. The film shows group meetings where community members recite the Sixteen Decisions that Grameen Bank uses to improve the lives of those it loans to and help ensure that the people are able to replay these loans.
The founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, is a former Fulbright Scholar from Bangladesh. He is known for developing the concept of providing small loans to entrepreneurs who would not qualify for bank loans, in a practice called microcredit. At the time of the documentary, he had loaned $2 million to ten million women, with a repayment rate of 99%. He has continued his campaign against poverty with the co-founding of Grameen America, which Gayle Ferraro documented in the follow-up film To Catch a Dollar. Yunus's dedication to battling global poverty earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, and he has declared that his mission is to "help create a world free of poverty.
Read more about this topic: Sixteen Decisions