Fati Walet Mohamed Issa, a young documentary filmmaker from Mali’s north, said that her goal is to shine a light on the plight of women in the conflict-torn Sahel state.
“Women are often either taken out of school to get married, or they are not allowed to go to school,” the 24-year-old said.
Mali is a conservative Muslim-majority nation of 21 million people, where swathes of the country are in the hands of extremists, and pressure for women to conform to traditional gender roles is strong.
Photo: AFP
However, Issa is uncowed. She has finished shooting a 10-minute film in a Tuareg encampment in Timbuktu.
The documentary is titled Tamadjrezt, which means “regret” in the Tamasheq language of Issa’s Tuareg ethnic group.
“I want to talk about them, about us,” she said, referring to women.
In 2012, Tuareg separatists launched a rebellion in Mali’s desert north, which spiraled after it was commandeered by extremists.
Thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, and 2 million people have been displaced.
Issa’s documentary follows a 15-year-old girl named Fatma, whose family fled to Mauritania because of the conflict, but then returned home.
Fatma attended a school built of straw, which did not survive the torrential downpours of Mali’s rainy season. Despite her wishes, her father refused to allow her to continue her schooling elsewhere.
“For us, women and girls have to take care of the home,” Fatma tells the camera.
Issa herself comes from the same traditional nomadic Tuareg background as Fatma, where education for girls is not deemed a priority.
The filmmaker herself fled to Mauritania and returned to Mali, and also had to pause her schooling because of the conflict.
However, last year, Issa applied and was selected by a US nongovernmental organization called Accountability Lab to make a short film about the status of women, which resulted in Tamadjrezt.
She screened it in the middle of December, alongside nine other commissioned films.
Zeina Mohamed Ali, a project manager at Accountability Lab, said that the organization wanted to give a voice to women, whom she said “are not listened to enough.”
Issa, who has a young child, said that her ambition is keep making films that speak to her community, and especially women and girls.
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