Drowned in mist or bathed in sunlight and dotted with poppies, the imposing silhouette of Mount Sinjar returns as a leitmotif in Michel Slomka’s photographic work on the Yazidis. This Kurdophone community of five hundred thousand souls, which practices a syncretic religion more than four thousand years old, has chosen this massif, on the northwestern borders of Iraq, as its homeland. Its sides today contain the memory of the massacre perpetrated against it by the Islamic State (IS) organization ten years ago.
On August 3, 2014, and the days that followed, tens of thousands of Yazidis tried to escape the men in black by taking the road that leads to the summit of the massif. Having proclaimed their caliphate straddling Syria and Iraq, the jihadists wanted to subdue this minority, considered to be “unbeliever”. More than three thousand people were killed, executed or starved to death during the siege of the city of Sinjar. ISIS members kidnapped six thousand five hundred people – women and girls reduced to sexual slavery, boys recruited as “cubs of the caliphate”.
A few months after Sinjar’s release, on November 13, 2015, photographer Michel Slomka and director Alexe Liebert began their documentary project Sinjar. Birth of ghosts, where photography and cinema intertwine to narrate the trauma of Yazidi survivors. The images of Michel Slomka, already gathered in a collection (Charlotte Sometimes, 2017), punctuate the story of the documentary that they present in theaters from June 19. Carried by a text read in voice-over by the Franco-Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, it reweaves the thread of the memory of the Yazidi massacre.
An anthropological and sensitive look
“It is important that their words are relayed, even if it is a small community in a world which is not lacking in conflicts and horrors, explains Michel Slomka. ISIS violence against Yazidis has taken multiple forms. This is a genocidal attempt or ethnic cleansing of the 21ste century having struck a community which lived withdrawn into itself for a very long time. » For the 37-year-old photographer, the persecution of this minority scattered in Iraq and Syria is part of the work he has built over the years, with an anthropological and sensitive look at the disappearance, traces and reconstruction of Memory.
The trailer for the film Sinjar, birth of ghosts
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