Tale of mutilation reaches the screen

[Somalina]

Somali model-actress Waris Dirie understands pain.

 

At the age of 5, she was told that there was evil between her legs, and if she wanted to marry one day, it had to be removed from her body. As her mother held her against a rock, a village woman mutilated her.

 

Eight years later, Dirie walked nine days from her rural home in Gaalkacyo to relatives in Mogadishu in order to escape an arranged marriage to a man more than three times her age.

 

She then traveled to London to work for her uncle. She was discovered at a McDonald's by photographer Terence Donovan, who put her on the cover of a 1987 calendar and launched her modeling career.

 

She soon became the face of Chanel, Levi's, L'Oréal and Revlon, and found film work as a Bond girl in “The Living Daylights.”

 

But it wasn't until 1997 that Dirie revealed her painful past to Marie Claire magazine, putting a face on female genital mutilation. As a result, she was asked to be a United Nations special ambassador for women's rights in Africa.

 

“If I hadn't been on billboards on Times Square and the face of Revlon, I don't think anyone would ever have been interested in my story,” she said in a recent phone interview.

 

Dirie's story, published in her book “Desert Flower,” is now the basis of a film of the same name opening Friday at Cinemas Palme d'Or in Palm Desert.

 

Speaking from her current home in Gdansk, Poland, Dirie said she is excited that the film is finally coming to the U.S. “I've waited a long time for it to come to America,” she said. “America needs to understand that this is not in the Quran, that it is not religious. FGC (female genital cutting) is a brutal, brutal crime against women and nobody talks about it.”

 

Interest in turning Dirie's story into a film began shortly after her book was published, but it took nearly a decade before it became reality.

 

In the intervening years, Dirie published “Desert Dawn,” “Letter To My Mother” and “Desert Children,” which was used to launch a European campaign against FGC.

 

Once the film, which stars Somali model Liya Kedebe, began shooting, Dirie stayed away from the set.

 

“I didn't want to see what they would do to my story until it was finished,” she said.

 

But Dirie is pleased with the finished product. “When I see people walking out of the cinemas with such sadness and anger on their faces, I know my story got to them,” she said. “That was what I wanted.”