BAGHDAD — In a pivotal scene from the 2021 documentary “Sabaya,” two men rescue a young woman named Leila from a Syrian detention camp for the families of Islamic State fighters, putting her in a car and driving her to a place safe as shots are fired behind them.
In interviews with BBC Radio and others, the film’s Iraqi-Swedish director Hogir Hirori recounted the strain of the rescue and the terror of the journey as they ran from Al Hol detention camp with the young woman, one of thousands of women and girls. of Iraq’s Yezidi religious minority who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS.
The dramatic scene helped the Swedish government-funded film garner rave reviews and awards, including Best Director for a Foreign Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last year. But following an investigation by Swedish magazine, Kvartal, Hirori admitted he was not there when Leila was released, replaced another woman and lied to an interviewer from the BBC.
The admissions follow New York Times findings last year that many traumatized women initially did not consent to be in the film or declined but were included anyway. The director’s confession also renewed accusations that the documentary downplayed the forced separation of mothers from their young children, born during slavery by the Islamic State – and turned the very men responsible for this separation into heroes for the have saved.
While Yazidi women sexually enslaved by ISIS were welcomed by their communities after ISIS was defeated, the children were not. Some women did not want children, but for most the forced separations had serious repercussions, including suicide attempts.
In a statement released after the Kvartal investigation, Hirori acknowledged that he depicted Leila’s escape “using a rescue scene of another woman that I was involved in.” He said the woman billed as Leila, the main character, didn’t want to be filmed after the rescue, so he didn’t mention her in the documentary.
Speaking in Swedish through an interpreter, he told BBC Radio last year: “It was important for me to film what was happening because it was the reality.” In the interview, one of many in which he expressed the same sentiment, he also spoke about Yazidi women: “It’s not just numbers, it’s people like you and me.
The BBC removed the lengthy interview from its website after questions from the press. A BBC spokesman said it was under review. Hirori said in his statement that he regretted not telling the BBC the truth about the rescue scene.
A timeline from Kvartal also showed that in three scenes that included reports of the battle against ISIS and a Turkish invasion, audio was inserted from events that had happened several months earlier or from weeks later. In at least one of the scenes, the hero of the film reacts to news from the car radio that he could not have heard.
Hirori and the film’s producer, Antonio Russo Merenda, a former curator of the Swedish Film Institute who said he was heavily involved in the film’s editing, did not respond to requests for comment from The Times.
In his statement following the Kvartal investigation, Hirori said the film was not intended to be journalism and that the Swedish documentary tradition allowed filmmakers “to express their own view of events”.
Kristina Eriksson, communications officer at the Swedish Film Institute, said: “We are following the debate on the role of documentaries and welcome the discussion, but nothing has emerged so far that gives us reason to act. compared to the movie. She declined to say whether the institute has procedures governing the veracity of the documentary films it funds.
The issue of forced separations is the most controversial among Yazidis. While the Yazidi reception center featured in “Sabaya” was tasked with finding and caring for hundreds of Iraqi Yazidis released from IS captivity, the organization, acting on the instructions of former Yazidis in Iraq, also arranged for the children to be removed from their mothers. Most were sent to an orphanage in northeast Syria, which the women were not allowed to visit once back in Iraq.
Almost all the women were told that to return home after being rescued from Al Hol camp, they would have to abandon their children. The women were also wrongly informed, as was one of the women from ‘Sabaya’, that the separation would be temporary.
Hirori said he had no space in the film to address the issue. “My goal was to try to document how these women and girls were saved and not get into the whole child abandonment thing,” he said in an interview with The Times last year. .
Sherizaan Minwalla, a human rights lawyer based in Erbil, Iraq, who has worked extensively with Yazidi genocide survivors, said: “The film paints a false narrative of women with children who were rescued while in fact they were hiding with their children to avoid being separated before returning to their families in Iraq. Some women were so afraid of being separated from their children that they chose to stay in the Syrian detention camp rather than be rescued.
A limited number of released Yazidi women have been reunited with their children. Since these mothers and their children are threatened by the Yazidi community in Iraq, almost all have been moved to other countries.
“The director doesn’t need to show situations that are entirely made up lies in the film for it to be a misrepresentation,” said Jennifer Crystal Chien, director of Re-Present Media, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that advocates for storytelling from underrepresented communities. . Omitting key information means the viewer can “draw the wrong conclusions”, she said.
The documentary was rejected by the Human Rights Watch Film Festival last year due to concerns about the consent of traumatized Islamic State survivors, but it screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
Months after the release of “Sabaya”, the filmmakers obtained written consents but in languages that most women do not understand. The agreements allowed the filmmakers to use their names, stories, and all images for any project, in perpetuity.
“There are certain types of things that somehow feel exciting or dramatic or have some sort of heroic outcome,” Chien said. “Those kinds of things are very appealing to people who make decisions about funding and programming, even though they may not know anything about the real situation in the area or if the images that are obtained could possibly be obtained with informed consent.”
Sangar Khalil contributed reporting from Erbil, Iraq.
