Hogir Hinori’s haunting POV documentary Sabaya takes us to hell itself: Syria’s ISIS-run Al-Hol encampment. There, captured Yazidi (Kurdish religious minorities) women are kept as sex slaves. Beaten, raped, sold into marriage. Forced to convert to Islam. Sold again. Raped. Beaten. Sold. They are known as Sabaya. In the Yazidi Home Center in northeastern Syria, Mahmud, Ziyad, and an extremely brave and bold network of former Sabaya women plot, plan, and execute the rescue of these women.

The Kurdish/now-Swedish Hogir Hirori’s ground-level documentarian approach puts us right into the action, balancing nighttime cell phone footage with fairly casual, fly-on-the-wall follow-up interviews with the rescued. If the film feels guerrilla and lo-fi, it’s largely because it is. This is about as minimalist as it gets – and Hirori doesn’t do a lot of hand-holding, as director or in the editing chair – and the footage reflects that. Though underscored by omnipresent danger and the lingering threat of ISIS soldiers, Hinori’s footage during the rescues is checkered: minimal, obscured, somewhat difficult to parse. We’re left squinting and trying to figure it out much like the rescuers themselves in the moment.

As Mahmud, Ziyad, Hinori, and others try to remain as invisible as possible against the eye of the Islamic State, the film Hinori captures suggests jeopardy and menace but at times Sabaya is narratively hogtied by an inability to capture critical moments on camera. The danger is at once imminent but not so present in the raw footage; intuited more than outright indicated in some instances. That it’s still able to be edge-of-your-seat in flashes is a striking feat.

Hinori assembles a captivating homage to the men and women thrusting themselves into what quite literally appears to be the worst place on Earth in order to rescue the captive Yazidi girls. Throughout the feature, Mahmud and the other men remain somewhat opaque figures though, smoking and bickering, plotting and planning, but never entirely fleshed out. I couldn’t help but feel left wanting to dig a bit more into their motivation, to learn what makes these specific men tick and put themselves at such high risk.

These shortcomings aside, Sabaya achieves what any great documentary should in pulling back the veil on a world so many never knew existed. In this case, it is not a world you wish knew existed.

The reality of this world is stark and upsetting. Insidious and hellish. The Yazidi girls and women are tragedies come to life. Their torment often unfathomable. Overcoming the heartbreak of a life spent enduring psychological, physical and religious torture is simply incalculable to someone watching a film festival movie on a plush couch. Coming to terms with this immeasurable juxtaposition is a challenge the viewer must face for themselves and Hirori seems to understand this.

As one rescued Yazidi girl weeps and offhandedly suggests she will soon kill herself, it’s impossible not to empathize with the depth of her despair, sorrow, and loss. Her entire family has been murdered. Brothers, sisters. Mother and father. She spent nearly a decade beaten and raped. And yet, hope manifests itself in the ugliest of places, which we see in the former Sabaya women who dive back into the Al-Hol camp to save the very girls they once were.

As Hinori puts it, this is “a film about those who risk their lives every day to save others. It is a documentary about the intolerable and unacceptable consequences of war, about abuse and suffering, but also about humankind and compassion, second chances in life and new beginnings.” Sabaya is a hard film but in these moments of rising in the face of improbable torment, Sabaya too reflects the incalculable resilience of the human spirit. Though we’re unsure of the fate of the suicidal girl, the viewer has to hope that she discovers herself back on the frontlines; finding purpose in pessimus.

CONCLUSION: Though one may be left wanting more footage and more character after watching the horrifying ‘Sabaya’, there is no denying the raw power of Hogir Hinori’s guerrilla documentary which shines a light on one of Earth’s darkest spots.