One of the key projects is the development and pre-production of the motion picture Bring Back Our Girls, a story based on true events, the abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boco Haram terrorists. Alina Reyzelman is working on the movie script, she also plans to produce and direct a film.
The story starts with Boco Haram terrorists abducting over 200 female students in the middle of the night in Chibuk, Nigeria. Girls between 12-15 y.o. were loaded by extremists to the trucks and taken away from the village to the forest.
A brave journalist from LA shares the pain of Nigerian mothers, she is dedicated to help to find the girls. She uses the power of social media to call for actions through blogging, interviews and discussions with journalist colleagues across the world. She manages to get attention of politicians and celebrities to help her to push for the campaign to attract attention to the abduction. In April 24, 2014 the social campaign was trending on Twitter. The famous hashtag #BringBackOurGirls had been used over 1.5 million times by May 7. The biggest contribution to the celebrities campaign was made by Michele Obama. She posted her photo in Facebook and Twitter holding a sign with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.
The world was watching how the social media campaign was gaining momentum and international community was getting involved. Finally it was hope that girls could come back home to their mothers. USA had deployed 80 military personnel in Chad (on the 22nd of May) in addition to 16 military personnel sent there earlier (in the beginning of May), which included experts in communication, civil affairs, operations, logistics, intelligence.
In early May, 2014 Nigerian governor received the information that the girls were noticed, crossing the border of Cameroon and Chad. However, all hopes vanished when new video appeared on the internet where one can see more than 130 kidnapped girls. The video said that Christian girls had been converted to Islam, sold to slavery, raped, killed or married of to terrorists.
Despite these sad facts, a brave journalist doesn’t want to give up. On the anniversary of April 14th, 2015 she writes a inspirational article and posts that she will not give up her efforts until all girls are back home.
The story highlights many issues that are associated with terrorism and challenges that exist today in countries like Nigeria such violence, religious intolerance, peoples indifference, non-intentional promotion of radical groups (Boco Haram actions demonstrated in media inspired some radical individuals to join groups such as ISIS).
