Karama Has No Walls

In her Oscar-nominated short documentary (in Arabic, “karama” means dignity), Yemeni-Scottish director Sara Ishaq brings a violent protest to vivid and disturbing life. In March 2011, citizens in Sana'a, Yemen's capital city, took inspiration from the Egyptian uprising launched in Cairo at the end of January to set up a tent city where they sang, danced, and spoke out against the 33-year regime of autocratic President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Two intrepid cameramen, 19-year-old Nasr and 23-year-old Khaled, captured what happened next as the peaceful gathering in Change Square turned ugly. To their remembrances, Ishaq adds interviews with Abdulwahed and Ghaled, the fathers of two young protesters (as Abdulwahed puts it, “Anwar and his friends launched a revolution”). The trouble for the protestors began when a wall went up between the square and the neighborhood, after which armed thugs began patrolling the perimeters, and flammable substances (including gasoline and melted rubber) appeared. Soon, the wall exploded in black flames as military-backed snipers pelted the citizenry with rocks from above and gunfire from below. After the unarmed people pushed through the wall, the barrage continued, but the protestors refused to retreat, bringing the injured to a makeshift hospital inside a mosque where doctors did what they could. A total of 53 people would end up losing their lives, while hundreds more suffered critical injuries, including Ghaled's son, Saleem. Undeterred, Nasr and Khaled continued to film the unrest for the next five months as many more lives were lost. The protesters would eventually succeed in ousting Saleh from power, but as this haunting documentary makes clear they paid a steep price. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)