The Documentary
It’s rare for a documentary maker to encounter a character as compelling as Jaha Dukureh, and a journey as extraordinary as the one she’s taken from The Gambia in West Africa to the U.S., and back again. Better still to be able to document this 25 year-old survivor of female genital mutilation as she combats the brutal practices that almost destroyed her life.
Jaha has a natural, raw honesty when she's telling us her own story or remembering a small detail that brings back a flood of emotions from another time.
She also has an infectious passion and an intelligence that makes her a formidable opponent of this ancient practice, whether we’re watching her engage with people on a dusty street in a West African town or in a congressional office in Washington DC.
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Jaha bringing her anti-FGM message to the streets of The Gambia
Jaha’s life was not supposed to be like this. Tradition demanded that she be subject to FGM within a week of her birth. Just after her mother died, when she was barely 15 years old, she was taken to the United States to marry an older man she’d never met before.
She explains what was expected of her: submit to your husband and live an obedient life just like your sisters. That also meant “cutting” your own daughters and sentencing them to the kind of life that you and the women who came before you had endured.
This film is the story of how Jaha rejected that plan, escaped that "marriage" and went through many difficult challenges before she could begin to help others — first in the US, and then in her home country of the Gambia in West Africa.
First she launched a Change.org petition calling on President Obama to address the FGM problem in the US. After 220,000 people signed her petition the administration conceded and began addressing the issue. That success gave Jaha the impetus and the confidence to turn her attention to The Gambia where the Change.org campaign was followed closely in the media. She was going home.
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Jaha at her anti-FGM campaign headquarters in The Gambia
FGM is prevalent in 28 countries in Africa alone and involves the partial or total removal of female genitalia. 130 million women live with it's consequences and an estimated 6,000 girls are "cut" every day. This ritual is very painful and traumatic and often results in severe bleeding and fatal blood infections — Jaha’s sister died as a result of it. It also destroys sexual pleasure for women.
Wherever the documentary's cameras went there were FGM survivors who shared their stories. All are different but the impact of the violence done to each woman's body is an ever present trauma in their lives. The ambition of Jaha's Journey is to represent that pain and bring it to the attention of the world.
Last year Jaha launched an extraordinary campaign and grassroots organization to end FGM in The Gambia. It's already having a big impact. One result of the campaign is that for the first time there is serious consideration being given to making FGM illegal. It is also being seen as a template for campaigns against FGM in other countries in Africa.
Jaha's story and her journey contains within it the narrative of countless girls whose stories we'll never hear, their lives lived in the shadows, their dreams unfulfilled. The ambition of this film is to draw attention to their existence or, better still, that they themselves will see the film and draw hope from it, if not for themselves then at least for their daughters.
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Girls on a market
street in Serrakunda in The Gambia
Who has supported the film up to now?
The Guardian newspaper and the Human Dignity Foundation have generously supported our filming and editing to date. The Guardian has done more than any other media organization to investigate, document and highlight FGM while the Human Dignity Foundation has a long record of supporting those who work for individual and social change in Africa and Asia.
The Guardian's Global Media Campaign against FGM is an unprecedented media venture that Jaha has vigorously supported. Led by the award-winning investigative journalist Maggie O'Kane, the Guardian's anti-FGM initiative has begun targeting this brutal practice in a campaign that will take them to every country where it is prevalent.
The entire range of Guardian's extraordinarily detailed coverage of FGM -- both articles and short documentaries -- can be seen here.
Who are the key creative people behind the documentary?
The film's director and producer is Patrick Farrelly, an award-winning documentary maker whose work has appeared on HBO, PBS, the BBC, RTE and other European networks. The film's Director of Photography is Kate McCullough, who won the World Cinematography Award in Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival for His and Hers in 2010. Sinead Kinnane is the film's editor and her last feature documentary, the Emmy-nominated Burma Soldier, was shown on HBO in the U.S.
Where will the film be seen?
The film will first be aimed at film festivals internationally. After that it's hoped that it will have a life in cinemas and later on television in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
We have made a commitment to work with the Guardian Global Media Campaign on an international media outreach programme to make sure that Jaha's Journey is broadcast on popular television in ALL countries where FGM is practiced. This is a film that will make a difference on the ground in the countries where FGM continues to destroy the lives of generations of girls.
We'll also use a number of social media platforms to get the film out there in as many different versions and languages as we can.
In The Gambia Jaha has plans to tour the documentary around the countryside and show it to people in villages and towns using a mobile screen.
What will your contributions enable us to do?
Allow us to do more filming. There are a number of important developments on the horizon with Jaha and her work that need to be filmed.
We need to continue editing the film.
Allow us to commission a composer to score the documentary.
When the edit is completed the film needs to be color corrected and the sound mixed and sweetened.
The archival footage we’ll use will need to be licensed.
Graphics and animation elements will have to be created.
Read more about Jaha Dukureh
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In December 2014 The Guardian's Alexandra Topping wrote a
detailed article for the Guardian magazine about Jaha. This is the most comprehensive piece that's been written about Jaha's background and her campaign work.
Liriel Higa wrote
this article for Nicholas Kristof's blog in the New York Times that looks at the success of Jaha's Change.org petition and the prevalence of survivors of FGM who are now living in countries like the United States. The New York Times also featured Jaha in
this article by Julie Turkowitz about so-called 'vacation cutting' where young girls in the US are brought back to Africa to be subject to FGM.
Heather Wood Rudulph wrote this
comprehensive article about Jaha and two other survivors of FGM in Cosmopolitan magazine back in May 2014 when Jaha had just started her Change.org petition.