Borno State in northeast Nigeria has been torn apart by the Islamist insurgency for more than ten years.
These portraits of displaced people are exceptional, because no Western camera had visited Bama, a martyred city, since Boko Haram made it its ephemeral caliphate in 2014. Released after seven months, Bama now looks like a entrenched camp.
The schools, hated by the Islamists, are no longer empty.
But the campaigns remain subject to racketeering and attacks from Islamists.
Portraits
Fatima, 26, was forcibly married to a Boko Haram commander.
She did this to prevent her son from being turned into a child soldier by the Islamist sect.
But since then, her family has denied her and called her "a wife of Boko Haram".
Falmata, 50, saw a price on her head by Boko Haram for being a businesswoman.
She barely survived but lost everything and does not know how to feed eight dependent children.
As for Mala, 70, he survived a recent massacre of peasants but has not dared to go to the fields since.
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Difficult filming conditions
Pandemic and volatile security situation forced the team to reinvent its ways of working, with remote monitoring of the shooting in real time between two co-authors in France and the third in Nigeria.
The shooting took place over several weeks in order to take the time to meet our characters.
All in a very volatile security context: Maiduguri, the regional capital of Borno, was hit by an attack just two days after the team took off.
A rare subject that shows the absurdities of an endless war, of a situation that seems hopeless at a time when the Nigerian government wants to close the refugee camps.
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