Director Hogir Hirori talks to Business Doc Europe about the genesis of his latest doc Sabaya, the abduction of Yazidi women and girls for exploitation as sex slaves, and the stoic local heroes who work tirelessly to free them from captivity.
It is a cold and snowy winter’s day in Stockholm and over coffee and traditional Swedish cinnamon buns I meet Hogir Hirori, director of Sabaya, which is selected for World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance.
“Growing up as a Kurd in Northern Iraq my whole childhood was plagued by war and persecution because of my Kurdish ethnicity,” Hirori recalls. “My family lost everything and we constantly had to flee our homes. Life was full of hardships, but at least we had each other. I always wished I had a camera back then, to document the injustice my people were subjected to. Since then I have left the country and settled down in Sweden. But still, twenty years later, war, unrest and oppression prevail in my home country.”
With Sweden as a home base, Hirori has had the opportunity to return to document the fate of the Yazidis, a minority of Kurds, and how they “endured and survived countless genocides as they have tried to uphold their own religion.” This has led to a trilogy of documentaries which to set out to examine the consequences of war as well as the raw fate of the Yazidis in Northern Iraq. In 2016 he made The Girl Who Saved My Life. The following year The Deminer won the Special Jury Award at IDFA. The terrifying Sabaya, set in north eastern Syria, forms the final part of the trilogy.
According to Hirori, life in the Sinjar province where most Yazidis live was completely destroyed when Daesh (ISIS) attacked in 2014. “Families were shattered, men killed, and women and girls kidnapped and held captive by Daesh as so called Sabaya (sex slaves). Daesh believes it is their right to use them as slaves because of their religion.”
Originally the idea was that Hogir would tell the story in Syria with his wife Lorin Ibrahim, while their two young children would stay with their grandparents. But as the situation became more and more dangerous, with Turkish bombs falling metres from their house, the idea to make the film together was quickly abandoned, and they returned to Sweden.
But Hirori was increasingly impatient to document these cruelties so, in 2018, and encouraged by his wife, he packed his camera again and this time travelled to Syria alone to try to find out everything he could about the Sabaya.
“There, I met Mahmud and Ziyad, from the non-profit organization The Yazidi Home Center, who worked day and night to try to save the hidden Sabaya in the dangerous and infamous Al-Hol camp. I decided to follow their work,” says Hirori.
Often accompanied by female infiltrators, some of them former Sabaya, Mahmud and Ziyad continuously travel to the camp in an inconspicuous van. Once there, mostly by night, they must act extremely quickly to avoid capture and almost certain death.
Hirori points out that there were people who helped him a lot with his film permits, but equally there were those who did not want him to film in the Al-Hol camp. His identity as a Kurdish-Swedish filmmaker with roots in Iraqi Kurdistan could sometimes be a major issue in Syria. In response to this, Hirori states that a ‘no’ in the Middle East is never really is a ‘no’ and he often addressed obstructions creatively, with the help of his many contacts.
In Sabaya there are some harrowing scenes where they are the target of gunmen. I ask Hirori if he ever felt afraid. He replies that he was only really aware of danger at the beginning but that you get used to it quickly and simply become one of the locals, even accepting death as a possible reality. He conceded that at one point he felt particularly close to death when he found himself alone in Al-Hol, standing on the same spot where someone was stabbed to death the day before.
In all three of his films the director presents a cast of local yet unsung heroes, as opposed to saviours from afar, as is often the case in Hollywood or western narratives. To Hirori it is important to counter this dominant western narrative by showing the generosity of local people who set out to help each other. In Sabaya, not all of them are saving lives like Mahmud and Ziyad, but they certainly facilitate this as they look after the traumatized girls and women in their own homes with loving care once they are liberated from their ISIS captors.
Hirori concludes, “Sabaya is a film about those who risk their lives every day to save others. It is about the intolerable and unacceptable consequences of war, about abuse and suffering, but also about humankind and compassion, second chances in life and new beginnings.”
Sweden, 91 mins
Director: Hogir Hirori
Prod: Antonio Russo Merenda and Hogir Hirori for Lolav Media and Ginestra Film
Co-production: Axel Arnö for SVT, with support from The Swedish Film Institute; Nordisk Film & TV Fond; Film Stockholm/Filmbasen and in association with YLE, VGTV and RCS
World sales: Dogwoof
