Pascale Bourgaux
Kurdistan, 2022
Dimensions: 95 mm x 150 mm
“We did it!
We reunited Ana with her daughter. An emotional moment. They fell into each other’s arms.
Ana couldn’t stop crying. The little girl clung to her.
Three years of work, investigation, and perseverance.
Thanks to Mamo.
Thanks to us”.
Ana had not seen her daughter Marya for 4 years because she was forcibly placed in an Iraqi orphanage when she was a baby.
Like all Yazidi survivors, Ana suffered a triple punishment: kidnapped and raped by ISIS jihadists, they became mothers against their will and then were deprived of their children by their own community, which considers them ‘bastards of the enemy.’
It took me and my co-writer Mohammad Shaikhow (Mamo) 3 years, and 8 years in total, to make this documentary about Ana and her short-lived reun- ion with her daughter Marya, now aged 9.
“Hawar, our banished children”, a documentary co-produced by TV5Monde, RTBF, Switzerland and EurImages: nine times awarded at international festivals and screened at WARM 2023, followed by a debate with Ajna Jusić, the founder of “Forgotten Children of War”, the first association in the world, created by a child born of war rape.
Pascale Bourgaux
Kurdistan, 2022
Dimensions: 95 mm x 150 mm
