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Anna Bofarull

says

that perhaps one of the missions of this art that is so Western, so obscenely self-indulgent and so happy to reward itself at all hours "is to open our eyes to a reality that is not alien to us because it is distant."

She says it in a rainy Malaga Festival in front of the film '

Sinjar

' and next to one of her actresses who goes by the name of

Eman Eido.

She, 17 years old and born precisely in the Kurdish town that gives the film its title, neither agrees nor takes away the reason, she simply offers herself as she is.

Unfortunately, her lit and dark eyes have been open for too long to a reality - hers, her family's and her Yazidi community's - as unphotogenic as it is too close and too personal.

"My heart is not free, my memory remembers everything," he

says with open eyes and a maturity that scares as much as it amazes.

Eman Eido is one of the many girls and women who were kidnapped by the Islamic State when the conflict back in 2014 broke out in all its harshness.

"She was home," she says and trails off.

"I prefer not to say more. It still hurts a lot," she continues.

Her voice and that of the translator are synchronized in a pure silence that hardly admits metaphors.

She was nine years old, and from then until she was thirteen, she was a slave and knew "two masters."

"After the kidnapping,

I was sold to a 70-year-old man for $100.

I was abused, raped, beaten, starved... It was all very painful. It hurts to remember. I'm still afraid. I know there are many women who are still living the same situation that I lived", he says, remains silent and repeats: "My heart is not free,

The film recounts in several voices what happened and still happens both around Sinjar and in Barcelona.

There, in distant Kurdistan, a group of women resists as best they can in the face of fanatical brutality.

Here, in Catalonia, a woman played by

Nora Navas

discovers one bad day that her son, whom she loves so much, is no longer exactly her son.

Or he is but transformed into just the opposite of what he always wanted.

He has fled and is now one of the uncompromising and anti-enlightened army of ISIS.

The stories do not intersect or do so simply because they are all testimonies of the same wound.

"We are accustomed to seeing war from the perspective of men who are also political agents. We are accustomed, and we see this every day on the news, to contemplate any armed conflict from the instantaneous spectacularity of destruction. And yet, there is another banal and brutal war at the same time, oblivious to the cameras and the reporters, which has to do with the daily life of what is razed to the ground, of what is destroyed forever.

And that other war is suffered above all by women",

she reflects the director to place the depth of an essentially profound film in its proper context and perspective.

And with memory.

Eman now lives with her aunt and grandfather in Sinjar.

Little is known about the rest of her family.

And what he knows is confused in the story with desire.

"They are still with the Islamic State. I have no contact with many of them. I know my father and mother are alive, but I don't know where," he says before lashing out at his kidnappers and doing so with a veil of pessimism that he hardly dares. to hide

"They have planted their seeds and it is not going to be easy to finish them off,"

he says.

A scene from 'Sinjar', by Anna Bofarull.

In the film, she does not reproduce her story.

Her story is there, in the skin of another actress, but she plays a woman who, after being kidnapped as herself, decides to become a soldier and fight.

Despite everything, despite her age.

Bofarull says that the first impulse towards the film arose from the most obvious and even humanist of strangeness: "How is it possible that some women of my age are suffering such barbarity?"

On one of her trips to the outskirts of Mosul, she learned about the reality of the

Yazidi population.

, a minority heir to the oldest Zoroastrian religion, by the prophet Zoroaster, at the same distance from Christianity as from Islam.

"Precisely, their peculiarity makes radical Muslims consider them almost animals and accuse them of being pagan followers of the devil," says the director.

Indeed, in the province of Nineveh, in northern Iraq, believers live in Malak Tawus, the heavenly creature condemned to hell for refusing to revere Adam and the last witness of the beginning of the beginning of all time.

Bofarull tells that another of the silent dramas of these kidnapped women is to see their own sons transformed into flesh of the flesh of their rapists.

"Children are, on the one hand, the reason to continue living and to continue suffering. But, on the other, the only male reference they grow up with is that of abusers and rapists. In the refugee camps it was seen that the children of The kidnapped women were violent children who had to be taught to unlearn the barbarities they had experienced".

Eman, on her side, still has a hard time understanding the role played by Muslim women themselves.

"You saw that the men did not have any respect for them, you saw that they suffered like us, and, despite this, they did not give you any support. That hurt even more,"

she recalls.

Eman wants to forget.

But, he insists she, his heart is not free.

His memory remembers everything.

Eman says that she is happy to have made a film and that it is known what she has suffered and what many of her like her still suffer.

Eman promises herself to study and that she will be a doctor.

Emma opens her eyes.

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Know more

  • Iraq

  • Mosul

  • Barcelona

  • kidnappings

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