sabaya (d. hogir hirori)

Out on the other side of the cinemas or the blogs or the netflix or the ivory towers there is a whole other world which is the world that is waiting and the world before and in all likelihood the world that most inhabit now. This world remains outside the purview of the cinema or the blogs or the netflix or the ivory towers. There are no bridges or rope ladders. Then, every now and again, someone succeeds in jumping the gap, and the two worlds meet. In this documentary, Hirori achieves this.

Read around Sabaya and there is a controversy about how much is ‘real’ and who much isn’t ‘real’. The controversy is, in every sense, academic. Sabaya tells the story of two men who have made it their task to rescue the Yazidi women who were kidnapped by the Islamic State during its brief, tumultuous reign. The men know that many of these women are somewhere in the sprawling refugee camp in Northern Syria, close to the Turkish border, in theory controlled by the Syrian state, in practice the fiefdom still of Daesh. The villages surrounding the refugee camp are also sympathetic to Daesh. In one dramatic sequence, the men rescue a woman from the camp and are pursued and shot at as they make their way down empty roads, hoping to reach safety. We know the cameraman is in the car with the men and the woman. We know that this is documentary which is as real as it’s going to get, which is sharing the experience of those in the car with us, in the cinema.

It has been claimed that this scene has been staged. That the woman in the car who we see was not the actual woman in the car when the chase through the dark empty roads happened. That the interiors were filmed later. As though this discredits the authenticity of the film. I have no way of knowing whether these claims are valid or not, but what is evident is that the girl in the car was rescued (we see her later) and that the cameraman was in the car when it was pursued and shot at. What we have, at the most is a confluence of two realities, which does not in any way annul the reality of the film. If anything it underlines it. Every single representation of reality by a camera is a distortion of the actual reality (think Zapruder) and, should they so chose it to be, the task of the filmmaker is to present their version of the reality they claim to present as faithfully as possible.

And this, it feels, Hirori, a native Kurd, achieves. He shares with the viewer a reality which we realise is beyond our everyday ken. A reality of war, of abuse, of heroism, of hard choices, a reality which most of the world would rather not look at, with good reason, because these kind of realities only happen when everything has gone horribly wrong. All the same, someone has to document them, someone has to speak for the other side of the screens. Someone has to show that the Yazidi women can be rescued and are being rescued, that there is hope in the world, no matter how tarnished and flawed and desperate that hope might be.