Pearl

Yasmina Hamlawi meets Fos at the Group for the Abolition of Female Genital Mutilation where they are both speakers: "I thought I knew a lot, I fell head over heels in fact", says the director. They became friends. For two years, Fos confides in her, on the condition that her story remains anonymous: her infibulation, her forced marriage to an old man, the thousands of kilometers she traveled with a smuggler. "From the time I was a child until I was 35, I knew nothing but pain." 

While living in the Belgian center that welcomes unaccompanied minors like her, a gynecologist offers her to be disinfibulated. 

After reflection, she realized that she could not "bear this pain for the rest of her life", and accepted the surgery. But there is much more than her body to repair, namely the violence she has suffered as an exile, the violence related to her gender, the fact that she was born in an impoverished and unstable country where she will never be able to set foot again. She insists on being named in the documentary.

A true woman of courage, she reveals herself with candor and frankness about her reconstruction - physical and mental - in a salutary narrative that Yasmina Hamlawi weaves with remarkable finesse. 
 

Jenny Cartwright
Documentarian and audio artist