It is always difficult to write about a documentary - let alone a documentary so severe and important as Sabaya - and express an opinion reviewing it. After all, what can you review when a doc has been shot in tremendously dangerous conditions and the creators have endangered their own lives to bring such a story to the spotlight?
Sabaya, created and directed by Kurd director Hogir Hirori, is an extremely hard watch that takes us into one of the most dangerous camps in the Middle East, Al-Hol, where ISIS keep Yazidi, Kurd "unfaithful" women, as sex slaves, also known as "Sabaya". The director follows Mahmud and Ziyad, two true heroes, who work in a local Women's Centre and whose life goal is to find and rescue as many girls and women as they can from the grasp of their ISIS abductors. Each and every day, with whatever little equipment and resources they have, as well as with trivial information and pictures that they get through messages from families that've been looking for their girls, they enter the camp risking their lives. They go to tents and look at the faces of the girls and one by one they manage to take them out.
Higori follows them, filming the whole experience behind a burqa and taking the audience through all the danger and emotions that these heroes selflessly live through every day. The two men, along with their families that work in the Centre follow the news, tirelessly talk on their phones, rescue Sabaya and send other women (some of them former Sabaya themselves) to infiltrate the camp as spies.
During the documentary, we even meet some of the women (even a 7-year-old girl) who are rescued by the two men. It is easy to detect the trauma and horror that these women are experiencing (some of them were Sabaya for years). But with the help of the women who work at the Centre, we see the slow yet miraculous transformation they have after a few days of peaceful rehabilitation - we see the realisation in their eyes that at last they are free.
Sabaya is a rather subtle documentary. Yes, it takes us into the abyss of an ISIS camp - we even follow Mahmud to a prison where ISIS members are kept - but generally speaking, Higori does not delve into personal conversations or monologues. He simply is there to document and report what has been going on daily in the Middle East and does not end his film with a moral lesson. The truth speaks for itself and reality is much harsher than what appears on the news. 206 women and girls have been rescued. 52 of them have given birth to their rapists' children. More than 2000 still remain missing. That is the simple and haunting truth.
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