Film review: Al Sarkha (The Scream)

Filmmaker Khadija Al Salami, touted as the first women Yemen film producer, was compelled to leave home in Paris to revisit her native Yemen after seeing the extraordinary sights of throngs of Yemeni women taking to Sana’a’s Change Square to draw attention to their plight during the country’s uprisings. She arrived, armed with nothing more than her camera, to record the part a few of them played in a country’s battle to overthrow a dictatorship.

Hundreds of fully-veiled women wearing baseball caps depicting their collective message breaking down the segregation walls in Change Square is emotive and gripping, and Al Salami diligently follows them around Sana’a as they go about the business of trying to dilute years of oppression and fear as they go from camp to camp in the square to bolster their message.

But for all these efforts, we are not given enough of an insight into what led each woman to become so intertwined in the fight to be heard amongst the undoubted challenges of cultural and family pressures. Al Salami does provide some fascinating on-the-ground footage of a country rising up, but her own story, (she was forced into a marriage in Yemen aged just 11), goes largely unspoken, and the result is that a feeling of not getting under the skin of these woman resonates. More frustratingly, a year on, with 70 per cent of Yemeni women still illiterate, and the hundreds of women in the square replaced now by just 10 or so now campaigning amid a newly erected segregation wall, one is left wondering what they have ultimately achieved.