WHEN Neda told her children that she might have to kill them, they assented. Such was their suffering after Islamic State kidnapped and enslaved them, along with thousands of other Yazidis, a religious minority, in northern Iraq in 2014. Neda’s husband was taken and presumably killed; her eldest son, just 13 years old, was forced to fight with the jihadists. She shaved off the hair and eyebrows of her two young daughters to make them look boyish and sickly, so that IS rapists might leave them alone. Neda herself was raped, beaten and sold several times before she was bought and freed by relatives last year.

A number of catastrophic events have afflicted the Arab world in recent years. Western news reporting and Hollywood cinema tend to present these crises through disaster footage or stories about Western protagonists in which local people are merely extras. Film from the Arab world is often more complex and nuanced.

Recently, I was preparing the programme for a new season on contemporary film from the Arab world at The Mosaic Rooms in London. I have been privileged to watch incredible short and feature length films from Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. I believe these films make visible what is often invisible to the rest of the world – people’s everyday struggles.

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