Sarah Gertrude Shapiro is no stranger to heavy topics. The “UnREAL” co-creator has tackled a racially-charged police shooting, rape, and suicide in her Lifetime hit. And now she’s set to take on more disturbing and timely subject matter. Deadline reports that she’s planning to make her feature directorial debut “on a story garnered from some of the most heroic women in the world: the 100-plus female army fighting against ISIS whose members suffered through the Yazidi genocide in Iraq and then turned the tables on the terrorists.” As the source contextualizes, “the Yazidis are the Kurdish religious minority who have been hunted down, enslaved, and killed.”
The as-yet untitled project has found a home at Amazon Studios, and Shapiro is currently writing the script with plans to shoot ASAP.
The film’s plot isn’t known at this time, but sources tell Deadline that Shapiro “is in a deep dive into research with a number of experts on the subject — people who have been on the ground, journalists, aid workers, and those who had been held captive. Apparently, she is talking to one of the lead experts in the field and contacts who know well the struggles in Kurdistan, Syria, and Iraq about the plight of the Yazidi sex slaves, specifically those who have escaped their ISIS captors, taken up arms, and are training to retake Mosul and kill their rapists.”
Kayla Mueller is one of the women Shapiro is researching. The late Christian aid worker was “held captive and made sex slave with a Yazidi girl at the home of ISIS leader Abu al-Baghdadi. Mueller was held captive for 18 months, and it was kept secret by the Obama administration. She often was kept locked by herself in a dark 12-by-12-foot room for weeks at a time,” Deadline writes. There was a great deal of confusion and controversy surrounding how Mueller’s capture was addressed — or not — by the Obama administration, the FBI, and Doctors Without Borders, the org that Mueller was helping with at the time of her imprisonment.
“The Yazidi sex slave eventually escaped and lived to tell the tale, but Kayla did not. So it seems the unlikely but profound bond between these two women might loom large in this female-empowerment film,” Deadline speculates.
But Shapiro isn’t focusing exclusively on this particular story. She’s also researching “European jihadi brides, Twitter-happy teen jihadis who rushed to Syria from France, Australia and England to marry jihadis — some of whom played a central role in torturing their husband’s sex slaves.”
Anna Gerb (“Margin Call”) is among the project’s producers.
Shapiro has won a Peabody and received an Emmy nod for “UnREAL,” a dramedy about what goes on behind the scenes of a “Bachelor”-esque reality dating show.
“In terms of the themes we are exploring, there is an aspect of women hurting and destroying other women. But we also felt we had an absolute priority to create female characters that can be as flawed and complicated as Don Draper or Walter White and Tony Sopranos,” Shapiro has said of “UnREAL.” “There was a great step in that direction with a show like ‘Nurse Jackie,’ that show women who can be both heroic and flawed, terrible and wonderful, strong and scared. All the things male characters on TV are allowed to be,” she observed. “And then there is the fact that we had two female leads who talk all the time, and not about men, but about their fears, ambitions, morals, work. We are very proud that we clobbered the Bechdel Test. Our female characters rarely talk about men with each other, and are very much in control of their own lives.”
Shapiro’s co-creator on “UnREAL,” Marti Noxon, just made her feature directorial debut with “To the Bone,” a semi-autobiographical drama about a young woman (Lily Collins) who is dying from anorexia.
