Refinery29 | These Portraits Will Change the Way You See Refugee Women

I sat with four other women at a makeshift table, holding warm mugs of chai in our hands and chatting as though we were longtime girlfriends at a Sunday lunch. Only the setting was Neubau refugee camp in Berlin. We sat inside a bare bones room equipped with a mini-fridge, assorted chairs, and a queen-size bed where a baby girl slept peacefully. 

It was the middle of January and I had just embarked on a trip through Germany and Greece with a small group of filmmakers to chronicle the stories of women and girl refugees for She Is Syria, a multimedia documentary project. I didn’t know what to expect tackling such a devastating and urgent issue, or whether anyone would even be willing to talk to us. But over the course of the next two weeks, I was awestruck by the willingness of the Afghan, Kurdish, Iraqi, Palestinian, Iranian, and Syrian women I met to share their experiences.

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