The 2014 ISIS genocide against the Yazidis has been the topic of several recent documentaries, most notably Alexandria Bombach's On Her Shoulders, Zahavi Sanjavi's Imad's Childhood [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film] and Hogir Hirori's controversial Sabaya [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Hogir Hirori
fiche film]. Now, Polish director Hanna Polak's Angels of Sinjar covers it in an extensive manner by following a survivor in search of her kidnapped sisters. The film shared the Gilda Vieira de Mello Prize with The Silence of the Mole by Anaïs Taracena at FIFDH in Geneva (see the news), where it world-premiered last week.

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Mount Sinjar in Northern Iraq is the holy place for the Yazidis, and this is the area that ISIS stormed in August 2014 after the Peshmerga pulled out. After the director has given us the religious background of the ethnic group in a voice-over, accompanied by aerial shots of the breathtaking region, the drone takes us to the city of Sinjar, with a population of 90,000 before the genocide. Now, the place is a ruin, with most of the buildings destroyed.

This is where we find Hanifa, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, crying at the grave of her father, who died of a heart attack after hearing of the fate of his daughters. Hanifa's mother and two sisters have found asylum in Germany, and with the help of Kurdish fighter Hamood, she is on the hunt for the other three sisters, who are in ISIS captivity. ISIS is known to take Yazidi women as sex slaves, and they occasionally offer to sell them back to their families.

In a village near Sinjar, we meet Saeed, the brother of activist Nadia Murad, the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize and the subject of On Her Shoulders. Six of their brothers were killed and one was captured by ISIS, and he takes us around the places where the massacre happened. In parallel, Hanifa's account describes how her sisters were taken. This is where the film's storytelling is still a bit shaky: the destroyed region makes for a desolate background to stories that we are not yet able to fully grasp or connect together.

But when Hanifa and Saeed go with the director on a trip to Krakow, where they take part in a UN conference, and then move on to Germany, where we join her mother and sisters, things start falling into place. This happens after a central segment, edited to maximum effect by Marcin Kot Bastowski, in which Nadia's touching Nobel Prize acceptance speech is followed by a shockingly heartbreaking scene of what seems to be a symbolic mass burial, including a remarkably cinematic Yazidi ritual.

The alternating sequences of Hanifa's investigation and the testimonies of surviving ISIS victims make for a harrowing, but captivating, watch. The account told by her youngest sister, who was about seven when she was abducted, is especially devastating.

There are sometimes one-year gaps between the shreds of news that Hanifa gets, and she immediately jumps in a car with Hamood. This most often leads to disappointment, but when she finally manages to get one of her sisters back, their reunion, filmed on a dusty street amidst onlookers with a handheld camera, captures raw emotions in a way that catches the viewer unprepared, and confronts them with their own tempestuous feelings that are hard to define and impossible to put into words. Even if Angels of Sinjar is often an uneven viewing experience and could have been trimmed down from its 109 minutes, it gives the plight of the world's most heavily persecuted minority an intense and visceral expression.

Angels of Sinjar is a co-production between HBO Max, Poland's Hanna Polak Films and Germany's Saxonia Entertainment, with the participation of ZDF/ARTE and Czech Television. Germany's Deckert Distribution has the international rights.