Hawar, Our Banished Children opens with the shots of a serene and peaceful stretch of snow. But, on this seemingly calm landscape, begins a journey grounded in boundless turmoil, violence and violation, both physical as well as emotional.
The documentary by Pascale Bourgaux follows a Yazidi community woman Ana (named changed), secretly crossing Kurdistan to meet her little daughter Marya after four long years. In the process it presents a wrenching account of an inhuman separation imposed upon the two, a decision in which they never had a say and still don’t have the choice to determine the course of their future.
The searing Belgian-Swiss co-production had its world premiere at the recently concluded Visions du Reel, the Swiss documentary film festival held at Nyon.
The present plight of the mother and daughter goes back to the year 2014 when Daesh militants invaded Northern Iraq from Syria. Ana became one of the thousands of Yazidi women kidnapped, abused, brutalised and left pregnant by the jihadists. Upon her release she was welcomed back in the family but forced to abandon the one-year-old baby born in captivity. Marya is one among the thousands of children that were considered “Bastards of Daesh”, the carriers of “enemies’ blood”, by the Yazidi community that believes strongly in the purity of lineage—marriage and children are not allowed outside the community. But was this the mother’s fault or that of the child? Why had they been punished for a crime they never committed while the perpetrators have stayed scot-free? These are the moot questions that the film asks.
With the focus on one team of mother-daughter survivor, Bourgaux brings to light, in all the painstaking detail, the misfortunes of many such women and children, relationships and families forced to stay suspended in the quagmire of conflict, craving a sense of belonging but dangling in a no man’s land of enforced desertion. Stories of the human fallouts of political strife that are invisibalised, forgotten and denied, that don’t become the headlines that they deserve to be. The film is a product of a humanitarian investigation carried over eight years in which Bourgaux got unforeseen access—evident in the film—built on an instinctive sense of trust.
The journey with Ana also winds through a shrine, refugee camp and orphanage on the way and is interspersed with accounts of silent sufferings of other “twice victims” like Ana, who didn’t just face the cruelty of the jihadist but were also betrayed by their own people.
For reasons of security, Ana herself is never shown in the film, she is always with her back to the camera. At times her voice is laconic in recollecting the scars of her past—how she was abducted, how she didn’t want to have the baby and hated her initially, how she can smell her daughter, kiss her and keep her safe in her dreams but can’t have her for real—which makes the experience doubly painful. At others you hear her weep, shoulders heaving, never see her tears but can feel the weight of her agony.
However, the film ends on a note that underscores how truth can at times be stranger than fiction. Much as Our Banished Children dwells on the mercilessness of Ana’s own community, there’s a surprising show of benevolence in the so-called enemy camp. The incongruity of Ana and Marya’s situation couldn’t have got starker as we see her recall how she traced Marya clandestinely, got her out of the orphanage and, ironically, decided to give her custody to the parents of her Daesh violator.
You can see the rationale in her contentious decision. The old couple is as poles apart from their son, as Ana is from some of the Yazidis. The two deeply love their grand-daughter and are affectionate towards her mother, the woman wronged by their son. They outrightly reject their son’s jihad and want him to turn away from violence and give up militancy. They believe in plurality, in the essential oneness of human beings beyond the divides of nationalities, regions, communities and religions. Everyone is welcome in their home: Muslims, Christians, Jews, Yazidis. They are the poignant glimmer of hope in the bleak film and personify the promise that, like degeneration, salvation also lies within us. It’s for us to choose to be human.
