Cameras, Pencils, Traumas: Drawn Images in and as Documentary Practice

Night and Fog in Kurdistan, a documentary film in its last stages of post-production at the time this chapter is being written, documents six years in the life of seven teenage girls who survived the ISIS genocide of Yazidis in 2014. Night and Fog in Kurdistan is a hybrid documentary in its way of combining different types of images, various perspectives, and different approaches to documentary filmmaking. In this film, the photographic image is once in a while interrupted and joined by drawings that serve different functions: They illustrate what is being narrated, portray what has not been captured by any media, or reproduce the archival photographic images. Analysing these functions as situated in the broader frame of different media relations, the article aims to investigate the affordances of drawing for documentation, especially in the case of traumatic experiences and in interaction with other modes of representation. The article is based on an analysis of the final cut of the film plus different versions of the drawings as well as two in-depth conversations with the director and her team.