Sixteen Decisions
2000 film directed by Gayle Ferraro
Sixteen Decisions is a documentary film directed and produced by Gayle Ferraro, exploring the impact of the Grameen Bank on impoverished women in Bangladesh. The bank provides micro loans of about $60 each to the poor, as well as promoting a social charter that gave the film its title.
The film was Gayle Ferraro's first, begun in 1997 and completed in 2000. It has been shown at multiple film festivals, including the 2001 New York International Independent Film and Video Festival and 2002 Women With Vision Film Festival. It won the Bronze Award for Women's Issues at the Houston Worldfest, and was broadcast by PBS in 2003
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 repay these loans.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7533042. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2000, 2001 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sixteen Decisions” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.