After the hypnotic ‘Sonata for cello’ and the historic ‘Barcellona 1714’, the Tarragona filmmaker Anna Bofarull makes a sort of return to origins with ‘Sinjar’, presented out of competition at the 25th edition of the Malaga Film Festival and at the BCN Film Fest, in which he narrates three fragmented stories featuring three women whose lives are marked by the barbarism of the Islamic State and this shows how this creates a web that affects in various ways and in all of them, women are the main hit.
‘Sinjar’ refers to the Kurdish city and region of Sinjar, located in northwestern Iraq, near the Syrian border, in the mountains that give the area its name. The title also recalls the Sinjar massacre, the genocidal killing and kidnapping of Yazidi men by ISIS in August 2014. It is precisely the Iraqi city that begins this three-story film, with which Bofarull, who also wrote the screenplay, made a multifaceted portrait of the consequences of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East and of how it affects women above all. The beginning is frontal, showing the horror that ISIS has unleashed in the areaas the sequences are played by two of the women who will be the protagonists of the film, who try to escape from the place together with the father of the family and the rest of the brothers.
Bofarull shows how women become objects of war, being enslaved, subjected, raped and deprived of all dignity. Bofarull makes a charge of denunciation, since two of his stories are linked, narrating how the mother of that family ended up being the servant of an IS leader, while her young children forcibly convert to Islam, and also telling how the eldest of the family, Arjin manages to escape and decides to enlist in the Kurdish women’s militias to free his mother and brothers from the barbarism of Isis.
Give voice and face to those women enslaved by the barbarism of Isis
These two stories are told crudely, without palliatives, but also without falling into mannerisms. Bofarull shows a sublime sobriety, as he manages to bring to the public the horror that these women experience with the aim of raising awareness, to take a closer look at a war that seems distant but is not. He succeeds thanks also to her two magnificent actresses, Halima Ílter shines, but what dazzles is the newcomer Eman Eido, a Kurdish refugee in Turkey, who, in fact, has experienced the horrors of Isis firsthand, his character being a way to exorcise the trauma. On the other hand, the story that Arjin manages to evoke the powerful documentary ‘Comandante Arian’, with which Alba Sotorra has told the daily life of these militia women who are fighting for their freedom.
Secondly, Bofarull tries to approach the dangers of jihadism and how its tentacles can get very close. This is shown in the third story, the only one that is not directly related to the other two, only by theme. The protagonist is an always magnificent Nora Navas, This story shows how jihadism behaves like a dangerous sect, capturing young people who are experiencing a moment of weakness, as in the case of the son of the character of Navas., a widowed nurse from Barcelona, who is perplexed when she discovers that her offspring, converted to Islam, joined ISIS and fled to Syria. Bofarull shows how, back in 2014, there were no tools to avoid this type of capture and how the tentacles of barbarism take many forms. In this sense, this story comes close to the view that Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar had on this phenomenon, barely addressed in societyin the wonderful ‘Le ciel awaits’.
Bofarull goes back to his roots, why ‘Sinjar’ is twinned with his early documentary works, in particular with ‘Hammada’, in which he recounted the reality of a Saharawi refugee child in Dakhla. In this case, she does it from a female perspective, highlighting how, in armed conflicts, women are the main hit. Decidedly, it is the most notable work of the Catalan director, whose social commitment is real and concrete, remembering that horror and barbarism are not so far away and that rights, especially those of women, must be protected every day. Powerful declaration that gives voice and face to all those victims of terror.
Note: 7
The best: It allows you to bring the public closer to the story of the women of the Kurdish militia fighting for their freedom against Isis.
Worse: In the end, it ends up suffering from the “Babel effect”, because the story of Novas, while important, remains in no man’s land as it is not so connected with the other two stories.
Source: E Cartelera
