In Nigeria, a new movie is being screened in remembrance of the nearly 100 schoolgirls who remain in captivity ten years after their school in the northeast of the nation was raided.

Lawan Zanna remembers his daughter Aisha in his prayers every single day. She was one of the 276 schoolgirls abducted ten years ago in the Chibok village of northeastern Nigeria when Islamic extremists broke into their school.

Talking about it enrages me so much,” said Zanna, 55, whose daughter is one of the nearly 100 girls who remain unaccounted for following the 2014 kidnappings that shocked the world and ignited the international #BringBackOurGirls social media movement.

The first significant school kidnapping in the country of West Africa was the Chibok kidnapping. At least 1,400 students have been abducted since then, primarily in the northwest and central areas that are ravaged by violence. The majority of victims were only set free after deals backed by the government or after ransoms were paid; however, suspects are rarely taken into custody.

Members of the Chibok community from Borno state came together on Thursday in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial center, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of a tragedy that has been mostly forgotten. The event was a collaborative film project called “Statues Also Breathe,” which was made by French artist Prune Nourry and Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University.

This partnership seeks to draw attention to the global fight for girls’ education while also drawing attention to the predicament of the missing girls, according to Nourry.

The 17-minute film begins with an aerial view of 108 sculptures, representing the number of girls who were still missing at the start of the art project, that attempt to recreate the girls’ current looks using images given by their families. These include visible patterns, hairstyles, and facial expressions.

The movie documents the creative process for the exhibit, which debuted in November 2022 and features sculptures the size of human heads that are modeled after ancient Ife terracotta heads from Nigeria.

One of the liberated women talks about the atrocities she experienced in captivity in the movie. “We endured pain and were assaulted.” But Allah (God) strengthened me,” the woman remarked.

In addition, it portrays a range of feelings as grieving moms remembered their daughters’ childhood.

“When Ramadan comes around, Aisha adorns my hair with henna and various other adornments,” a woman in the movie mentioned in reference to her kid who vanished.

But Aisha hasn’t visited her family in ten years.

In a different scene, a woman is asked to go see her daughter’s sculpted face, but she hesitates. She said, her voice growing weaker, “If I go and see it, it will bring sad memories.”

According to activist Chioma Agwuegbo, who participated in the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, Nigerian authorities have not gone far enough in their efforts to free the remaining women, and those who have regained their freedom have not received adequate care.

Regarding the abductions of schools in Nigeria, Agwuegbo remarked, “We have normalized the absurd in Nigeria.” “After ten years, it is still an indictment against our security forces, the government, and even the people themselves.”

Analysts are concerned that many schools continue to have the security flaws that led to the kidnapping in Chibok. According to a recent survey conducted by the Nigerian office of the UN children’s agency, out of over 6,000 schools surveyed, only 43% of the minimum safety standards are met.

The International Crisis Group’s senior adviser for Nigeria, Nnamdi Obasi, claims that military and police personnel are still “very much inadequate and overstretched,” and that “the basic security and safety arrangements in schools are weak and sometimes nonexistent.”

Updates on the efforts to free the Chibok women are rarely given by the authorities. As is frequently the case with female kidnap victims, some of the freed women have previously claimed that the people who are still missing were forced into marriage with the extremists.

Since early 2022, about a dozen of the Chibok women have been able to break free from captivity. Every one of them came back with kids.

As stated by one of the Chibok moms in the movie, “I think we shouldn’t even think about them anymore.” “It seems as though they have already left.”