“It Was Not Really Possible to Use Any Safety Precautions or Protocols”: Hogir Hirori on his Sundance-debuting Sabaya

Hogir Hirori’s Sabaya is a harrowing tale of heroism from a filmmaker all too familiar with the wartime struggles of those he documents. With his latest, the final piece of a cinematic trilogy that includes The Deminer (which nabbed the Special Jury Award for Feature-Length Documentary at IDFA 2017), the Swedish director, who fled his native Kurdistan in 1999, returns to the battle zone to spotlight the dedicated civil servants of the Yazidi Home Center. Putting their lives on the line 24/7, two brave men and a slew of extraordinary, anonymous female “infiltrators” fight, using phones more than guns, to save the Sabaya, the Yazidi women and girls held as sex slaves by ISIS. It’s a calling that leads them to Al-Hol in Syria, the Middle East’s most dangerous camp, where the brutalized hostages blend in with their perpetrators, rendering identifying, let alone extricating, them a herculean task. To learn all about this ongoing rescue mission and the film’s nail biting production, Filmmaker turned to Hirori, himself a man with a calling, the week before Sabaya’s January 30th debut in the Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Documentary Competition.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.