Event: SND2020 Virtual Conference
Date: September 18, 2020
Visual storytelling can be difficult during a brutal war. Often, important visual elements of the story are unavailable. Two teams of VOA journalists explored stories from Iraq while the Islamic State (ISIS) group controlled cities and towns across Iraq and Syria, by integrating illustration and animation into documentaries.
Shoura is a town in northern Iraq and former home to several leading Islamic State militants. After ISIS was forced out of the town, the community tried to figure out how the families of Islamic State fighters could coexist peacefully side-by-side with the victims of ISIS brutality.
VOA’s Middle East correspondent Heather Murdock led a small team on the ground, interviewing, filming and returning to the town multiple times over the course of a year. She wove the stories of sometimes explosive tension into a 25-minute documentary. Because many of the stories were highly personal and weren’t visually documented during Islamic State’s control, Heather and a team of VOA journalists in Washington decided to combine audio from the interviews with hand drawn animation, to create short, animated vignettes interspersed throughout the documentary. “Shoura: An Experiment in Reconciliation” is the story of one town attempting to heal in the aftermath of the Islamic State.
The genocide committed against a religious minority, the Yazidis, in a region of northwest Iraq, occurred behind the Islamic State’s veil of brutality. Multimedia journalists in VOA’s South and Central Asia Division, one of them a watercolor artist, teamed to tell the story initially through watercolor and later combined the art form and sketches with TV images in a full-length documentary.
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