‘Sinjar’: Malaga Review

Dir/scr: Anna M Bofarull. Spain/US. 2022. 127 mins.

The terrible impact on three women of life under Islamic State  is explored with great care and compassion in Catalan director Anna M Bofarull’s powerful and painful third feature Sinjar, a valiant film about valiant subjects that played out of competition at Malaga. 

The kind of urgent, politically committed film making that deserves further festival play despite its imperfections

As one character reminds us, things in that blighted area of the world are not as the TV channels suggest. Bofarull takes us away from the men and their guns, and into the hidden day-to day sufferings of Arjin, Hadia and Carlota as they fight to recover the loved ones that Jihad has taken away from them. A step up in range and ambition for the filmmaker, this is the kind of urgent, politically committed film making that deserves further festival play despite its imperfections.

The film takes its title from the area close to the Syria/Iraq border where thousands of Yazidi people were abducted and killed by Islamic State in 2014. It is set in the aftermath of that atrocity, with its events based on the personal testimony of survivors. The first of the three interweaving stories belongs to Arjin (Eman Eido, herself abducted by Islamic State as a young girl). Following the abduction of her family, Arjin will end up searching hopelessly for them before deciding, along with her friend Samia (Samia Naif) to join the resistance. Here we witness the traumatising effects of war, as Arjin is transformed from a victim into a warrior herself - though the script never allows us into her thoughts.

Along with her three children, Hadia (a compelling Halima Ilter) is living in a state of permanent fear as a slave in the home of the aging tyrant Abu Omar (Mouafaq Rushdie). At night, Abu Omar slips into bed with Hadia to have sex with her as she lies patiently waiting for it to end; by day he teaches Hadia’s son Elyas (Elyas Bereket Qassi) to recite from the Koran and to hold a Kalashnikov correctly. The presence of young children makes this perhaps the most heartbreaking of the three parts; it is also the most rounded as drama.

The Barcelona-set third story, which inevitably feels somewhat stranded, sees nurse Carlota (Nora Navas) losing her son Marc (Guim Puig) after he converts to Islam and flees to Iraq. Carlota receives little institutional help – the police can only refer to Marc as a problem adolescent – and decides to head to Syria to find him. The dramatic burden falls entirely on Navas, who is delivers a truly devastating performance at those times when the script allows her to: but this is the flattest part of the film as well, with several scenes failing to advance the story very far as Navas is compelled to smoke endless, reflective cigarettes.

‘Horrible things are happening in Sinjar,’ someone says to Arjin, which pretty much says it all. Much of the early part of Sinjar – the action suddenly ramps up after an hour - feels like intimate documentary, recording scenes dispassionately and displaying them for the viewers to reach their own conclusions. The juxtaposition between the normalising, low-key tone and the horrors on display is striking, with Lara Vilanova’s camera keeping the three protagonists tight in and close, as though it’s afraid of losing them.

Inevitably, the film is dotted with startling scenes: a funeral for a dead soldier as a comrade sings out her memory in a bright, clear voice; a teddy bear found in the rubble; blood being wiped off stones. But some viewers may question the decision to lose dramatic momentum by breaking the narrative into short sequences rather than delivering each one as a block, especially since the sections don’t seem to be cross-commenting on one another in any structured way. 

It’s as though Bofarull, presumably in the belief that there is already quite enough drama on screen, is aiming to keep it real and responsible and actively deflect possible accusations of manipulating the material for cinematic effect. But given the dignity, ambition and urgency of a project like Sinjar, of course, quibbles about structure and character seem mean-spirited and out of place.