Written and directed by Emanuela Zuccalá

Photographs by Simona Ghizzoni

Video by Emanuela Zuccalà Simona Ghizzoni

Curated by Renata Ferri 

A project by progetto di Zona

An ordinary room, or a dark hut in a rural village. A razor blade bought at a market will suffice, or a sharp knife, or simply a shard of broken glass.Sometimes needle and thread, or the thorns from a wild-growing bush. The women of the family restrain the little girl while a circumciser is paid to inflict in her a pain so intense that it will never be forgotten.

For 200 million women in the world, the passage from infancy to adulthood is marked by the blood of a female genital mutilation (FGM). The procedure comprises cutting the clitoris, sometimes scraping away the labia minora, up to the removal of all the external genitalia and sewing the incision closed leaving a small hole for menstrual flow and urine, which will later be cut open on the wedding night. An obligatory ritual in certain societies, it is believed to “purify” women from their own femininity, subjugating them through pain and making them virgins for life, resistant to sexual pleasure, and therefore shaping them as devoted and faithful wives.

Uncut is a film, an exhibition and a web documentary that narrates how in three African countries – Somaliland, Kenya and Ethiopia – women have been uniting in coalitions in order to eradicate this harmful practice. It’s a collective story that sews together several tales of pain, of a fight for women’s rights and, in many cases, of success and empowerment.

Uncut was realized thanks to the Innovation in Development Reporting Grant Program of the European Journalism Center and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the support of ActionAid Italy and No Peace Without Justice.

Media partner: Io donna, Corriere della Sera, Worldcrunch, El Paìs.