This week I got a head start on Hot Docs by watching These Girls. The film was about a group of girls living on the street of Cairo, Egypt, and the issues they face on a daily basis.

The film didn’t try to tell a story, reach a climax, or weigh in on the issues that it captured. Instead, it just presented the girls as themselves, “as they fight, laugh, brag, sniff glue and fiercely try to protect one another from sexual assaults.” The result was an intense, stark, and unmediated look at the difficulties faced by girls on the street.

Throughout the movie, the girls seemed to avoid direct discussions of sex and sexual abuse. Instead, they talked about the shame of having a “scar in the face” and the risk of being kidnapped and taken somewhere by groups of men. “They come in gangs. Numbers beat courage.”

When one of the girls became pregnant, she told the camera, “If its a girl, I’ll kill her. I don’t want her to be like me.”

After the birth of her son, she worried about his lack of papers: “To the state he is nobody. All I want is a birth certificate, but how do I get it?”

The tension throughout the film between fathers and daughters, men and women, and within the group of girls was so strong that I sighed with relief when it ended. Being involved with the Because I am a Girl campaign, I hear every day about the issues that girls face. Even so, its a different matter when its captured so full-frontally on film.

These Girls is playing on Friday, May 7 at 3:45 at Cumberland 3.

Stay tuned next week for more reviews!