05/07/2021 - Zahavi Sanjavi's devastating documentary looks at the consequences of ISIS captivity on a young Yazidi boy and his family

In his new film Imad's Childhood [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Kurdish Iraqi-born, Swedish-based director Zahavi Sanjavi revisits Iraqi Kurdistan and the situation of the Yazidi people in the ISIS-occupied territories after the 2016 IDFA title The Return. The shocking, heartbreaking and eye-opening documentary world-premiered at Hot Docs and is now playing in Docaviv's Beyond the Screen competition.

Our hero is five-year-old Yazidi boy Imad, who was captured by ISIS together with his mother Ghazala and little brother Idan in the region of Sinjar in Iraqi Kurdistan, two-and-a-half years before the film starts. Presumably bought back from ISIS for a large sum of money, they are now in a camp for displaced Yazidi people, along with their families. The boy's father is still in captivity, and our initial narrator is the father's mother, a lucid old woman who tells us things that Ghazala is not in any state to.

Imad and Idan were virtually brainwashed in these first, truly formative years of their lives, and only speak Arabic and call each other the names that ISIS had given them. Consequently, Imad does not seem so much a wild child, but rather a violent warrior: he hates women, his mother and grandma included, and behaves with an angry, domineering attitude. When Ghazala scolds him, he spits in her face.

His grandma tries to enrol him in a kindergarten, and when the teacher takes him to meet other children, he acts like a concentration-camp guard. In one of the film's many intense scenes, the kids sit on the floor in a large room, and Imad, with a wicked expression on his face, goes around hitting each of them – clearly emulating his ISIS role models.

Eventually, Imad is taken to a psychologist, Berivan, a lady who treats young children in the camp. At first, her attempts to teach him to create and nourish, instead of destroy, are fruitless: given a Barbie doll, he will literally behead it, saying, "It's normal." But through patient, hard work, childish innocence resurfaces in his face, and it appears there might be hope for him after all.

However, the film is just as powerful and heartbreaking in what it doesn't explicitly show, and this is Ghazala's own plight. Sold a dozen times between ISIS members and used as a sex slave, she is broken and almost constantly in tears. Instinctively focusing on her sons, she had no time to look for help for herself. Still hoping for her husband to return, the only instances when she smiles are when she talks about their courtship and marriage.

Sanjavi has the courage to deal with – and the skills to frame – such a devastating story without any sentimentality, placing the cruelty of the protagonists' situation front and centre. There is little compromise beyond organising it into a coherent, linear narrative through Eva Hillström's editing: the viewer is directly faced with a painful, shocking experience.

When DoP Heshmatolla Narenji is following Imad with his handheld camera to catch how he behaves when he is on his own, in the sun-drenched but muddy camp, he captures all of the contradictions within our tragic infant of a hero, creating an unstoppable momentum. For the viewer, it feels like a whirlwind in which it is impossible to grab or hold on to anything that would prevent you from being flung away, out of your safe, comfy seat in the cinema or your living room.

Imad's Childhood is a co-production by Sweden's AVB Production and Latvia's Fenixfilm, in collaboration with Swedish public broadcaster SVT and Iraq's Rudaw TV.