As a reporter, she has documented the latest conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan, and as a correspondent for LA7, in Ukraine and Gaza. In 2018 she presented a documentary in Venice on the children of ISIS militiamen.

L'OFFICIEL: You have been in very different war scenarios. In a context of collective tragedy, how did you experience and document the specific condition of women? FRANCESCA MANNOCCHI: Women in war become custodians of the care of those who remain and do not go to the front, of those who survive and of memory. And if the war is inevitably told in a muscular way, it is up to them to maintain a daily life that must be reshaped according to new life. I remember the beginning of the war in Ukraine on March 22, the first trains taking old people, women and children away to Poland. I remember the men on the tracks, who on that occasion were allowed to cry, while the women had the duty to lie, the obligation not to let go of their emotions in the face of a destroyed life. LO: And in Islamic countries? Where the condition of women is already not equal? FM: As Westerners we underestimate the extreme importance of domestic life in Islamic countries. It's one thing to talk about women in Afghanistan, who are completely disenfranchised, for North Africa we need to scrape away our prejudices. LO: Do female war reporters report on war in a different way than their male colleagues? FM: Statistically the number of female correspondents in conflict areas is growing, on large chains such as CNN and BBC the most well-known correspondents from Mosul, Ukraine and Palestine are women. As women reporters we go to the front and participate in domestic life, we enter a kitchen and have people tell us about their lives, their desires, their points of view. A woman looks everywhere, in the mud of a trench and from the broken window of a room, ranging from the adrenaline-filled time of the front to the slow and suspended time of a snow-covered park with the destroyed children's games. We think that wars are made by men, but the struggle of survival falls above all on women. LO: With everything you've seen, what still makes you hopeful about the possibility of peace? FM: Observing humanity's ability to adapt, which manages to divide the little that there is, to do without everything and to continue to smile at its children. We should listen to the survivors more and ask them what they mean by peace, which is not the simple cessation of military activity. One of the answers I got was that there is peace when three generations don't remember the war, don't have the gunfire or the bombs in their memory. I remember an elderly Ukrainian woman in the garden of her house. He told me: &ldquo;We put the glass back on the windows: from inside everything looks the same, you go outside and everything has changed! But we must stop being told that we are victims, because otherwise we risk becoming one."

«Let&#39;s think that wars are waged by men, but the burden of survival falls above all on women.&quot;

LO: Did you return after the conflict was over to a place where you had been to report on the war? FM: I returned to Mosul. I had been there during the eight or nine months of the international coalition's offensive to liberate the city from the Islamic state and I returned for the Pope's trip to Iraq. In a church adjacent to the old city, the most destroyed part of the city, I met Father Olivier who told me: "Mosul has always been the place where the bell towers talk to the mosques." &nbsp; LO: One of your most viral reports is that of the 7-year-old boy from Jenin, who in the ruins of the house destroyed by rockets can only consider a future in which he will fight as natural. &nbsp; FM: Listening to children is the tool to try to make them understand that peace is what remains in the memory of those who survive. &nbsp; No one is born a martyr, drug dealer, murderer, but it is clear that growing up in a refugee camp, without electricity, access to schools, subjected to the violence of those who want to make you pay for the sins of your fathers is not an area of ​​fertile ground for peace planning. How this child will grow up, what he will do tomorrow, are the issues we need to reflect on if we want to build peace.
LO: You have been to many refugee camps. FM: Learning to observe them is a great exercise of the limits of our eye. First you see the expanse of plastic tents, then you see what is missing: children's games, shade, electricity; without electricity you cannot maintain food, you cannot give milk to children. Turning a tent into a home is the job of women. LO: What are you working on now? FM: We are finishing a documentary on the first year and a half of war in Ukraine, we would like to give the viewer the immersive experience of what war does to the human soul, subjected to brutalization, torture, abuse. We have the habit of stopping the war in its progress, of describing it as a succession of bombings and shootings, while the interesting point is to give space to voices. As "Zinc Boys", the wonderful book by Svetlana Aleksievic, tells us, war is also surviving the lack of everything, the depth of loneliness.

Women's rights: the interview with Francesca Mannocchi

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