Sabaya’s Greatest Flaw: It Missed the Story
By Jennifer Huang
In recent investigations by Kvartal and the New York Times, Sabaya director Hogir Hirori admitted that he misrepresented the most dramatic scene of the film in which Leila, the main protagonist, is taken from the Al Hol refugee camp. In this scene, he swapped one veiled woman for another without telling the audience, the film funders, or the press. The woman in the film is not Leila, but another woman.
While industry members debate the ethics of this lack of transparency about the film’s crucial scene, however, the bigger problem is that the entire film is based on the inaccurate representation of the work of the Yazidi Home Center. Mahmud and Ziyad of the Yazidi Home Center are portrayed as heroes, rescuing women from Islamic State captors. But in fact, many of those women had chosen to stay in the refugee camp because they knew that their children, born of rape by their captors of a different faith, would not be allowed in the Yazidi community. When Mahmud and Ziyad took the women from the camp, it was sometimes against their will. Sometimes they coercively separated the mothers from their children, a flagrant violation of the women’s and children’s rights.
Hirori said that he didn’t have time to follow this issue, and he was focusing on how the women were being saved. But the fact that the women didn’t want to be “saved” is the real story. It’s far more complex, messy, and heartbreaking than the film. And I would argue that choosing to ignore the real story goes beyond an artistic choice and ventures into negligence and harm.
I wish that Hirori had taken the opportunity to examine the nuance and messiness that he found, to show how humans doing something courageous could simultaneously be doing something cruel and inhumane.
And I wish that he had taken the time to center the survivors, to get truly informed consent and to portray them as complicated people with varying needs and dreams, agency and ambivalence.
It would also have been an opportunity to raise the critical issues these women face: why Yazidis refuse to accept these children, and how in trying to preserve their culture, they are creating a huge rift in their community and abandoning their own daughters. And how these women are now left effectively stateless and unmoored, forced to choose, impossibly, between their parents and traditions and their own children.
While we can’t know what was in the minds of the filmmakers, I don’t doubt that they were well-intentioned. It is a frightening reality of our occupation that even with the best of intentions, our films can have unintended consequences, and that with their power, reach and exposure, they can create significant harm for our protagonists.
That is why I am glad that as a field, there is a new awareness of these issues. Filmmakers are being asked to interrogate our own biases, our own relationships to our protagonists and the communities portrayed in our films, and to be extremely cautious about how we are representing vulnerable people. Had Hirori reflected on these questions, I believe he would have made a very different film.
As a community of filmmakers, we need to go even further. We need a deep, industry-wide shift in attitudes, practices, and expectations. Some ideas that come to mind are:
- Teach ethics and protagonist stewardship in film schools, probably before we teach lighting or camera angles;
- Make ongoing consultation with vulnerable protagonists the industry standard, rather than the exception;
- Be willing to fund and support projects that put ethical processes ahead of the film’s commercial viability and profitability (even if that means the film doesn’t get publicly released);
- Build mental health services and wellness resources into grants and budgets,
- Create support networks and resources for protagonists;
- Normalize conversations about protagonist stewardship, transparency, and responsibility;
- Create and standardize a role for an ethics consultant who evaluates the project before filming starts, through production, impact and distribution.
We’ve chosen complicated work without easy answers. In the struggle to raise funds, find distribution, woo gatekeepers, and finish our films, we filmmakers often forget the power we do wield. Let’s continue to learn from each other how to use our power responsibly.
As a Chinese American child growing up in Kansas, Jennifer was bullied relentlessly. This foundational experience led to her lifelong commitment to justice, especially for women and children. Her work has brought her to unexpected places: scrubbing for a kidney transplant at the Mayo Clinic, leaping from a crashing snowmobile in Aspen, and being detained in a shipping container in Papua New Guinea. She is making her directorial debut with the recent release of a documentary short about a labor trafficking survivor, This Adventure Called California, and is in post production on a feature-length documentary about teen sex trafficking survivors in the Philippines, The Long Rescue.