For ten years, Swiss filmmaker Anne-Frédérique Widmann followed Shewit, a 15-year-old Eritrean girl at the time of their meeting. After a long journey, she arrives in Geneva, in search of freedom.
A special relationship developed between the filmmaker and the teenager: one wanted to give a voice to young girls in exile, too often invisible, while the other wanted to tell her story and her path to emancipation: I think we chose each other. It was in 2015, at the time of the influx of unaccompanied minors, as they were called then. In Geneva, thousands of them were crammed into a rather grim shelter. And then I saw Shewit: she was the only young girl who agreed to speak. The first thing she told me was: “I want to go to school,” emphasizes Anne-Frédérique Widmann, director of “Freedom: The Destiny of Shewit.”
In search of a life of her own choosing, Shewit tells her story in the documentary Freedom: Shewit's Destiny, presented in competition at the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights: Initially, it was simply the desire to speak out, to show what life is like for a young girl who has just arrived in Switzerland. It wasn't easy. For me, it was important. And over time, we realized that this testimony could also help others.
Far from her fellow Eritreans who still live in the social conditions she fled, Shewit reminds us that leaving is never an easy solution. Nevertheless, she encourages young women to believe in themselves, to fight for what they believe in, and not to let themselves be confined by social norms.
