24/04/2023 - Pascale Bourgaux paints the unique portrait of Ana, who survived both jihadists and her own community

Hawar, Our Banished Children [+see also:
interview: Pascale Bourgaux
film profile], which explores the fate of yazidi women kidnapped by  jihadists, then threatened to be banned from their community for giving birth to children of ISIS, was presented this weekend in National Competition at Visions du Réel. Pascale Bourgaux has a long career in documentary filmmaking, geared for many years towards conflict zones, and the Middle East more specifically. Hawar is the fruit of over 8 years of work, research and encounters with yazidi women kidnapped and raped by the jihadists of ISIS. A journey that began near a decade ago, and which builds on two other documentaries: Femmes contre Daesh (2016), and Femmes yazidies : le combat pour la liberté (2014), released at the beginning of what is now recognised as a genocide, as ISIS invades Iraq from Syria. While a great number of men are killed, the women are often kept alive, reduced to the status of sex slaves.

The film gathers the testimony of Ana, who dares break the silence and shine a light on the double banishment she is subjected to: first, the kidnapping by the jihadists, then the rejection from her own community when she considers keeping her baby, “the enemy’s child,” with her. Ana talks about the day when ISIS fighters entered her village, kidnapping women and young girls, hiding them in transit in Mosul, before finally getting them into Syria. There, the women are subject to a sort of lottery, where each one is assigned to a fighter, becoming his sex object. Rape then becomes routine.

Around 2,000 yazidi women are in this way kept as slaves. Repeatedly rapes, many of them become pregnant. Once freed, these women are re-integrated into the yazidi community despite their “impurity.” A ceremony, which offers them a sort of new baptism, allows them to return to their loved ones, provided that they abandon their children, who are considered “evil beings,” the offspring of “repugnant fathers.” Most of these women bow their heads and enter the patriarchal order established by the religious order of the community. Sometimes, however, they run away, as did Ana, whom we are following in secret, as she looks for her daughter Marya, living with her paternal grandparents.

We walk behind Ana, whose identity remains hidden, and listen to her poignant testimony while looking with her at the deserted landscapes she crosses throughout the film, like an echo of her forced solitude, of her forbidden motherhood.

Between the various stops in her journey, we meet other women and other stories, like that of a mother exiled in Australia, who ran away from her family to find her children in Iraq; or that of an orphanage director who, alongside an American ex-diplomat, organises reunions between tearful mothers and lost children.

Ana’s unique story, which unfolds across most of the film’s runtime, before we get to see a few hours of her daily life and a few minutes onscreen with her daughter, illustrates the long, painful and sometimes dangerous path walked by these brave mothers to return to their children. Failing acceptance into the yazidi community, it also allows to restore, in front of the eyes of the world, the identities of children whose existence had been denied and of runaway women who have been declared missing.

Hawar, Our Banished Children was produced by Iota Production (Belgium) and Louise Productions (Switzerland). The film is sold internationally by CAT&Docs.

(Translated from French)