Sabaya

Name: Sabaya
Genre: Documentary
Released: July 30, 2021
Duration: 90 min
Rating: 86

2021

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Universal acclaim based on 15 Critic Reviews

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Sabaya

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Movie Details & Credits

MTV Documentary Films | Release Date: July 30, 2021 | Not Rated

Summary: Armed with just a mobile phone and a gun, Mahmud, Ziyad and other volunteers from the Yazidi Home Center risk their lives trying to save Yazidi women and girls being held by ISIS members as sabaya (sex slaves) in the most dangerous refugee camp in the Middle East, Al-Hol in Syria. Often accompanied by burka-clad female infiltrators andArmed with just a mobile phone and a gun, Mahmud, Ziyad and other volunteers from the Yazidi Home Center risk their lives trying to save Yazidi women and girls being held by ISIS members as sabaya (sex slaves) in the most dangerous refugee camp in the Middle East, Al-Hol in Syria. Often accompanied by burka-clad female infiltrators and working mostly at night, they must act quickly to avoid potential violence. In this visceral, often edge-of-your-seat film, we experience both the tense situation in the camp and the comfort of daily life at home, where Mahmud’s wife, Siham, and his mother, Zahra, lovingly help the traumatized girls shed off the black garments of an ideology that tolerates nothing but itself.… Expand

Director: Hogir Hirori

Genre(s): Documentary

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 90 min

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Critic Reviews

100

IndieWire Christian Blauvelt

Jun 12, 2021

There are many times in Hogir Hirori’s Sabaya, an anxiety-filled potboiler of a documentary about the fight to rescue enslaved girls from ISIS, where one might wonder how they pulled it off. That feeling is quickly followed by relief that they did. Read full review

100

Matthew Anderson

Jun 12, 2021

Sabaya does not shy away from the horrendous circumstances it finds, exhibiting bitterly raw emotion, fear and heartbreak very frankly. Read full review

100

Alex Saveliev

Jun 12, 2021

With unparalleled verisimilitude, Hirori captures both the helplessness and the resolve it takes to see past it, to hold on to a glimmer of hope, faint as it may be. Sabaya will leave you scarred, its images scorched forever into your mind. Read full review

Jessica Kiang

Jun 12, 2021

Sabaya is remarkable not least for how cleanly Hirori excises himself from it, careful to not get in between the viewer and these devastating stories with their 10 different flavors of heroism. Read full review

RogerEbert.com Tomris Laffly

Jul 30, 2021

There is so much earth-shattering bravery on display in the miraculous Sabaya that you wonder how the Swedish-Kurdish director Hogir Hirori managed to pull off a documentary that avoids showy, predictable notes of brouhaha throughout. Read full review

The Observer (UK) Simran Hans

Aug 22, 2021

[A] sensitive, frequently harrowing observational documentary. Read full review

Carlos Aguilar

Jul 28, 2021

As a journalistic depiction of the rescue operations as they happen, Sabaya brims with heart-pounding tension and immediacy. But given the access obtained and Hirori’s connection to the people and the land where this grim chapter in modern history is unfolding, the superficial handling of pivotal aspects of the story is disappointing. Read full review

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