Woman, Tuareg, and director. At 24, Fati Walet Mohamed Issa has just completed a ten-minute short documentary on the situation of girls in Tuareg culture: Tamadjrezt (Regretin the Tamasheq language).
Coming from the nomadic environment of the region of Timbuktu, in Mali, where education often takes second place, the young woman had to stop her studies for several years because of the conflicts that have affected this region for ten years. “With us, the woman, often, either we take her out of school to get married, or we refuse to allow her to go to school”she laments.
Grabbing “opportunity” to bring his story to the screen, Fati applied for a project with an American NGO. “We want to give women a voice. (…) They are not listened to or involved enough” in society, explains Zeina Mohamed Ali, project manager at Accountability Lab.
Prostitution on artisanal gold panning sites, domestic violence, education: unsaid and taboos of the very conservative Malian society are approached through ten films, screened in a conference room in Timbuktu, for lack of cinema, by the mission of the UN in Mali (Minusma).
In Tamadjrezt that she shot alone in a Tuareg camp in the Timbuktu region – “because the technical teams were afraid to come” –, Fati Walet features little Fatma, 15, who explains on screen that she wanted to go to school. But his father, Med Elmedhi Ag, refused. “For us, women and girls must take care of their homes”he says in the film.
The weight of customs means that “many young girls leave school in primary school”engages the voice-over of the director.
“I want to talk about them, about us! I made this film hoping that it will touch our community, change their opinion of young girls.”
Fati, young Tuareg filmmakerat AFP
“People are too governed by traditions here. But I realized with the film that there was hope, that they had to be made aware of something else!”, proclaims the young woman. In Mali, there are women directors. Corn “Tuareg women filmmakers? I don’t think so”she smiles.
Fati fled to Mauritania with his family, to the M’Bera refugee camp where many nomads found refuge after the outbreak of conflict in northern Mali. The region has been the scene for ten years of violence, initially Tuareg independence, which has since taken on an international dimension with the appearance of jihadist groups affiliated with the global nebulae of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. Nomadic communities, long marginalized by the central state, have been for some a breeding ground for these groups, for others the first victims of the conflict.
Fati dreams of what’s next: continue? “I really want to, I have a lot of themes in mind that I would like to address in films.”