Excellent material and tremendous undercover work both to rescue girls and to document the rescues. However, this documentary suffers from the dreaded "pregnant pauses" that plague many documentaries. Excessive lingering on B-roll footage loses the pace, causing the viewer to lose interest. B-roll is helpful to paint a fuller picture of the people working to free the girls, but audio of the liberated girls' testimony could provide valuable content during otherwise boring b-roll footage. We don't need to see a 30-second clip of cooking breakfast, or a 15-second shot of a brush fire (with no dialog) when a few seconds are sufficient to establish the action. Subject and dialog rating: 8-9. Presentation rating: 5.5-6. Thus a 7 average, where I should have been able to give it at least an 8.

[DocsBarna] The director manages to convey the tension of the rescue of Yazidi women enslaved by Daesh, even with the use of hidden cameras, which are intended to underline the thriller atmosphere, rather than provide additional information. "Sabaya" is a fim emotionally hard and formally precise in the construction of a narrative that sometimes seems to be repetitive but that is contributing more complex elements.