The film, “Sabaya,” from Sweden, won the prestigious Sundance Film Festival award for best director of a foreign documentary this year and opened the Human Rights Film Festival last week in Berlin. Critics gave it glowing reviews; its real-life scenes of car chases and rescue attempts are as dramatic as any fictional thriller.
But the film has upset some of the very people it was intended to celebrate: women from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority who were sexually enslaved by the Islamic State terrorist group for years and who are the main subjects. They and their advocates say it violated the rights of women, who had already been denied virtually all control over their lives, to decide whether they want images used.
After the fall of ISIS in 2019, some 60,000 women and children from territories that had been under the terrorist group’s control were crammed into the teeming camp. They included hundreds of Yazidi women who were forced to continue living with the families of the fighters who had enslaved them, even though most of those fighters had been killed in battle by that time.
“These are people who were kidnapped at a very young age and who were held as slaves and sexually abused for five years,” said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador who helped reunite more than a dozen Yazidi women with their young children who had been taken away from them. The Yazidi community in Iraq does not allow women to bring back children fathered by ISIS fighters.
“I don’t see how, in those circumstances, they have given informed consent,” Mr. Galbraith added, saying even if they had, they most likely did not understand the full repercussions of it.