By Colin McGregor
“Why should I hide behind an abaya or a niqab? I wouldn’t be recognizable, I’d be hidden. I want to affirm who I am. I want to feel free… That means I exist. I’m not absent, hidden behind an abaya or a niqab.”
With these words Ensaf Haidar, a proud Sherbrooke resident, mother of three, assumes her choices and her independence. She’s the main subject of the documentary entitled Waiting for Raif, a Macumba Media and National Film Board coproduction. She is the wife of the famous Saudi Arabian prisoner of conscience Raif Badawi.
Accused of having insulted Islam in his blog statements critical of the Saudi regime, in 2012 the young Badawi was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment and 1,000 lashes. A formidable international campaign to free him was mounted by Ensaf Haidar with characteristic courage, determination and dynamism.
After Badawi’s arrest, she and her three children were granted permanent residency status in Canada. They relocated to Sherbrooke in 2013, without speaking a word of French. Ensaf
Ensaf lived through all the hardships of an immigrant and a single mother to three children: Najwa, Doudi et Miriyam. In learning French and creating links with their new adoptive community, this family never forgot where they came from.
From 2014 to 2022, award-winning documentary filmmakers Patricio Henriquez and Luc Côté (You Don’t Like the Truth) followed Ensaf Haidar on her quest to have Raif Badawi freed. Even though this young charismatic woman became an international symbol of the fight for freedom of opinion, it is her intimate family journey that the documentarians decided to focus on.
Ill at Ease
At the beginning of the film, Ensaf is visible ill at ease. She admits being scared at having moved to Sherbrooke without any family support. We hear a filmmaker and a translator trying to encourage her at her first forays before a camera. But she gets used to being filmed, as does her family.
As the film’s co-director Luc Côté describes it: “There were a lot of people at their place. Lots of journalists and cameras in the home.” Our two documentarians soon became like members of the family: “It’s such a welcoming family, full of hospitality and intelligence. Well-raised children by a single parent… Our relationship with them developed very rapidly.”
According to the other co-director, Patricio Henriquez, “It’s a charismatic family. One difference between a journalist and a documentary filmmaker is that a journalist has to keep their distance whereas we are part of the action. We witnessed a lot of things… You have to have empathy to put yourself in their place. Like when the son says he can’t imagine the day when their father will return… They’re adorable. You can’t help but fall in love with this family.”
Over the course of several years of filming this documentary, the filmmakers and the family drew ever closer. “Time,” observes Henriquez, “is an important ingredient in all human relations.”
In a scene illustrating just how close they have become, Côte helps son Doudi when he shaves for the very first time by giving him advice from behind the camera while both are in the bathroom. It was a day that Côté just happened to be there. “Doudi called me in for advice,” he says. It was by sheer chance that he was there to help Doudi with this “rite of passage that a son usually shares with his father.”
A Lot of Material
With 186 days of filming and 300 hours of film including vigils for Raif in Sherbrooke (there were 376 vigils in total), it took the documentarians a year and a half to edit down their final product. They did it with the help of film editor Andrea Henriquez. According to Côté, she is “a very strong personality. There were difficult decisions… We had beautiful creative tensions. But no one has the corner on the truth for these sorts of things, and there were some wonderful compromises made.” The first version was 8 hours long!
It took time and long negotiations to come up with the final product: for example every time there was a vigil in Sherbrooke, there was a parallel one in Vienna, Austria. The documentarians went to Vienna to film, but none of their footage from Austria made it into the final version. Not enough space. As well, Ensaf went to Washington at one point to meet with senators and other dignitaries. There is no mention of this trip in the final film.
Another important character in this film is the city of Sherbrooke – welcoming and supportive of Ensaf no matter what the season: “She’s surrounded by a group that replaces her Saudi family,” says Henriquez. “Women, progressives, people who believe in Quebec as a country.”
Political Freedom
So no one was surprised when she stood for elected office as a Bloc Québécois candidate for the riding of Sherbrooke in the 2019 election. She finished second. “In Saudi Arabia, I didn’t have the right to vote,” she says. “I wanted to use all my freedom.”
Côté reveals that “her family came from a city about the size of Sherbrooke. That was certainly a blessing” that her family was placed in Sherbrooke when they arrived in Canada. “If she’d ended up in Montreal, she certainly would not have been as well supported as she was in Sherbrooke. The community looked after her children when she went to Europe.”
Indeed, La Tribune, Sherbrooke’s French-language daily newspaper, has published between 550 and 600 articles on Ensaf and Raif, making them the second most covered story since the paper’s inception in 1910.
Badawi served every day of his 10 year prison sentence. On March 11th, 2022, his family was informed that he had been finally released, but that he wasn’t authorized to leave the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for another 10 years. His family, scared of arrest, can’t go back home to see him. A lot of people have returned under similar circumstances and been arrested, Côté explains.
The film debuted at the International Film festival in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, in the city of Rouyn-Noranda. “The theatre was packed, and the whole family was with us,” Côté recounts. “After the two-and-a-half hour documentary was shown, everyone stood and applauded. A good start for us.”
At film’s end, in the credits, we read: “Ensaf, Najwa, Doudi, Miriyam et la ville de Sherbrooke l’attendent toujours” (The family and the City of Sherbrooke still waits for him).
The Children
In an interview held by Amnesty International with two of the children, Doudi and Miriyam, both reflect their enduring love for their father.
“Our father loves his country,” boasts Doudi. “He loves Saudi Arabia. He wants our country to be great. He is very strong, a real fighter.”
At first the father didn’t want his children to know he was in prison, fearing they’d think him to be some sort of criminal. The children didn’t know their father was in prison until he suffered the first 50 lashes of the 1,000 lash component of his sentence were administered by whip in a public square. “We didn’t go to school for a week after that,” explains Doudi. Everyone at school was talking about the whipping. Doudi was 9 at the time and Miriyam was 6.
After those first lashes, their father told them: Don’t worry, I feel fine. I didn’t feel any pain. “But he felt it. And we knew it,” says Doudi through tears.
The two children share a love of history and politics thanks to their parents.
“Sadly,” says Doudi, “we want to feel like we have a father. He’s not with us physically.” But Raif keeps regular Canadian hours in Saudi Arabia so he can wake up and fall asleep with his family thousands of miles away. “He’s a big fan of Canada.”
Miriyam, laughing, adds, “He suffers from jet lag!”
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