A 17-year-old girl in a light blue head scarf clasps her hands together and begs two teenage boys not to kill her. She isn’t crying, but she’s breathless, gasping at each plea: “Please let me go. Please don’t kill me. Somebody help me.”

The boys don’t listen, lifting their arms up to hit her with wooden sticks.

The screen turns black. Instead of a shriek and a struggle, 15-year-old Rasel Mohammed’s face appears.

“I know this may be hard for you to watch,” says Mohammed, his brown eyes unblinking. “I am tempted to skip this scene, but I won’t because it won’t be fair to the people who are going through this, who are going through this as we speak. Sometimes (you) just can’t look away.”

The two boys in red robes and red masks drag the girl away, her shrieks the only sound piercing the air.

This moment is chronicled in an upcoming documentary entitled I Am Rohingya: A Genocide in Four Acts. Filmed and produced over three years, the documentary takes the audience through a cinematic version of the crowdsourced and sold-out play 14 young Rohingya performed in 2016, re-enacting their family’s struggle to reach safety from Burma to Bangladesh to Canada. Aged 8 to 22, all of them were born or raised in the refugee camps in Bangladesh.





Since last August, close to 700,000 refugees have fled to Bangladesh in the wake of what the UN has labelled as “ethnic cleansing” by the Burmese government. On Tuesday, Bob Rae, Canada’s special envoy to Myanmar, also known as Burma, released his final report recommending Canada grant refugee status to persecuted Rohingya.

Yusuf Zine, the director of the documentary, was initially hesitant to include a scene referencing sexual assault, but the fathers of those in the play were adamant it be included.

Zine was an intern with Muslim Social Services in Kitchener-Waterloo in the summer of 2015 when he was tasked with organizing programs for the Rohingya youth. Instead, he asked them what they wanted to do.

“When Yusuf asked me, ‘Are you Rohingya?’ I was surprised,” said Faisal Mohammed, Rasel’s older brother, another member of the documentary cast. “No one had ever asked me that before.”

Mohammed, 22, was born in Burma; his parents fled to the refugee camps in Bangladesh when he was six months old, and stayed until he was 10. “When people ask me where I’m from, I have no idea what to say — Burma or Bangladesh?,” Mohammed said. “If I say Rohingya, people didn’t know what that was.”

Zine, 24, heard their frustrations about Canada’s lack of knowledge of the Rohingya at their first meeting. For two months they all shared stories with him. Ullah suggested doing a play, and Zine, with his theatre background, started writing it. In the process, he had dinner with their parents, who showed him live messages from family members still in Burma or Bangladesh.

“This community always wants to tell their story,” said Zine, recalling how at every scene, the kids would cry or breakdown with emotion.

In another scene, the kids rush in together to celebrate Eid. Mohammad walks in alone; his parents didn’t make it because they were killed by Burmese soldiers.

“And then we’re reminded that horror isn’t over,” 22-year-old Ahmed Ullah said. “We didn’t wake up from a bad dream, because it wasn’t a bad dream. It’s our past. Our present. Our future.” The film cuts to a group of actors dressed as their grandparents, and then their parents, and then themselves.

The play was performed, and the documentary created, before the recent crisis began.

“The more things happened, the more we wanted to include,” Zine said. A title card had to be added at the end of the film explaining how many Rohingya people had fled while it was being made, and how many had died.

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The decision to call it I Am Rohingya belonged to the youth, Zine said. At the play’s opening night in April 2016, one of the quieter 14-year-old boys in the film raced up the microphone and asked the 500 audience members at the University of Waterloo theatre to say “Rohingya” with him. They said it twice.

“I’m hoping this film will spark up awareness again,” he said. “These families bared their stories in front of me … I’m the gatekeeper. It’s my responsibility as a filmmaker to do justice to that.”

The film has sparked the interest of the United Nations and countries around the world, but its driving force has been in the Rohingya youth. “It’s because of the kids, that I don’t lose hope,” Zine said. “The kids keep hoping, keep protesting, keep fighting.”

The film will be screened in Toronto on May 11 and 12.