No fail-safe: Hogir Hirori’s “Sabaya”

Like many film journalists, not to mention jury members, who caught Hogir Hirori’s now discredited Sabaya at this year’s Sundance I was riveted, calling it (in the intro to my interview with Hirori) a “harrowing tale of heroism from a filmmaker all too familiar with the wartime struggles of those he documents.” Of course, thanks to the New York Times – and even more so to the dogged reporters at Sweden’s Kvartal – we now know that many of the key scenes in the Swedish-Kurdish director’s doc, which focuses on the ISIS sex slave-saving men and (anonymous) women of the Yazidi Home Center, were staged. Which as a non doc purist honestly bothers me less than the fact that Hirori, when confronted by an inquiring press, fictionalized his own account of obtaining said footage. And even more troubling, seems not to have obtained true consent from all his characters – and likewise not come clean about that terrible breach of trust either. Yet as a film critic with zero background in investigative journalism, I also personally don’t feel I “should have known better.”

To read the rest of my non mea culpa visit Global Comment.