In 2009, a Syrian journalism student arrived in Damascus for an exam with a secret escape plan. A SIM card was hidden in her shoe and a mobile phone in her underwear. As soon as she entered the building, she sent a message to her friends waiting outside. Moments later, she went into hiding, fleeing a violent forced marriage.
That student was Daro Hansen, whose debut feature “Little Sinner,” co-directed with Danish director-editor Thomas Papapetros, will have its world premiere on March 15 in the main competition at Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, CPH:DOX.
Spanning nearly two decades, the film draws on an extensive archive of personal material filmed across Syria, Denmark, Lebanon and Greece. What began as fragments of documentation gradually evolved into an intimate portrait of Hansen’s struggle to confront a traumatic past marked by forced marriage, family betrayal and exile.
The story begins when Hansen agreed to what she believed would be a temporary engagement meant to protect her family’s honor. Instead, she found herself trapped in a violent marriage.
During one episode she describes in the film, Hansen says her husband attempted to scalp her – a moment she says was the turning point when she realized she had to escape to stay alive.
She eventually moved to Denmark with the support of Toke, the Danish boyfriend who helped her escape and remained a central figure in her life for many years. But the psychological impact of what had happened followed her. When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, her trauma resurfaced. Drawn to the refugee crises unfolding in Lebanon and Greece, she repeatedly left the stability she has found in Denmark to throw herself into humanitarian work.
It took her years, she says, before she understood that the deepest wound was not the violence itself, but the moment her mother failed to protect her and sent her back to the violent husband she calls “the monster.”
That realization forms the emotional core of “Little Sinner.”
“Meeting these people, their strength, their way of continuing to live made a deep impression on me,” she says of working with the refugees. “In their stories, I recognized my own, but also something I had not yet dared to see. It became clear that I was actually doing the opposite to them: while they dared to stay in the pain, talk about it, and work through it, I was fleeing from my own.”
“If there is one simple message I hope people take away from this film, it’s that they find a shorter way home to themselves than the one I did,” she tells Variety.
Hansen, who was raised in a non-Muslim family, is keen to underline that this is a story about social control, not faith.
“People often associate forced marriage with Islam, but this is about tradition. Social control exists in every culture – it’s here in Denmark, it’s in the U.S., it’s in China.”
Papapetros and Hansen first met in 2012 while he was working on a documentary about the conflict in Syria, where Hansen had been hired as a translator. They went on to collaborate in Lebanon, where Hansen led filmmaking workshops with refugees.
Their work on Lesbos began almost by coincidence after Hansen was deported from Lebanon. Hearing that refugees were beginning to arrive on the Greek island, the pair traveled there and soon found themselves involved in humanitarian work at the height of the migration crisis.
Papapetros began filming Hansen almost instinctively.
“When I got to know Daro and her story, I felt it was important to also film her in those situations,” he says. “It was an instinct. It wasn’t planned.”
Much of the footage used in the film was not originally intended for a documentary. Hansen had been filming for years, often using the camera as a personal coping mechanism.
“It’s super private,” she says. “Sometimes I just used the camera as therapy.”
After years of shaping the vast archive themselves, Hansen and Papapetros – himself an award-winning editor at Sundance for Anders Østergaard’s “Burma VJ” – eventually realized they needed an outside perspective.
They invited editor Michael Aaglund to join during the final stages of post-production.
“We agreed that Michael would have the final say,” Papapetros says. “He kind of became the film’s ambassador.”
The arrival of Hansen and Papapetros’ son Lukas ultimately provided the documentary’s natural end.
“The last scene we recorded for the film was the birth of Lukas,” Papapetros said. “When that was in the box, we said: ‘OK – this is the end.’”
The title reflects Hansen’s interpretation of her journey: “Little Sinner,” she says, refers not to wrongdoing against others, but to what she describes as a quiet betrayal of oneself. “We learn very early in life to take responsibility for the atmosphere in our families and the relationships around us. We often go beyond our own boundaries for others, and in doing so, we forget to check in with our bodies and our gut feelings. Sometimes we forget ourselves completely – and that, for me, is the real sin. I forgot myself. I let myself down.”
Produced by Thor Hampus Bank for Danish production company GotFat Productions, “Little Sinner” was supported by the Danish Film Institute, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, the Western Denmark Film Fund, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and International Media Support.
CPH:DOX runs in Copenhagen until March 22.
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