As a girl of five, Mirene Igwabi walked 220 kilometres with her mother and brother to escape Congo's bitter civil war in the mid-1990s.
"I don't have very good memories of my childhood at all," the 24-year-old woman who now calls Brisbane home said.
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Adele short film: trailer
A 14-year-old pregnant African girl living in Brisbane faces pressure to leave school to live with her husband from an arranged marriage.
Ms Igwabi saw her mother threatened and bashed by Tutsi soldiers, she saw people shot and she remembers bodies lying in the water.
"Being part of a war at age five brings bad memories. Nightmares."
![Film-maker Mirene Igwabi has become one of Australia's rising stars, drawing on her experience as a refugee.](/web/20170312225623im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/s/u/k/x/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gusg10.png/1489146465017.jpg)
Twenty years later she has emerged as an inspiring Brisbane film-maker, capturing critics' eyes by writing and directing a short film that tells of the awkward, embarrassing reality of the arranged marriages faced by some young women arriving in Australia as refugees.
Adele is shaped by Ms Igwabi's experiences as a refugee, learning English at Milpera School at Graceville and then Yeronga State High School, where 80 per cent of students are either refugees or asylum seekers.
Her film has recently been accepted into Australia's premier short-film festival, Flickerfest.
It tells of a 14-year-girl from the Congo named Adele who lives in Brisbane in an arranged marriage at night, but as a pregnant high school student during the day. Adele lives in two worlds; as a child student and as a wife and lover.
![Ms Igwabi on set during the making of Adele.](/web/20170312225623im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/s/x/p/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gusg10.png/1489146465017.jpg)
Adele is Ms Igwabi's graduation film from the Brisbane SAE College at West End, where for two years she studied film-making.
Ms Igwabi said she made the film to tell the truth about arranged marriages, which are still happening to young refugee girls living in Australia.
![Actor Princess Mariama Andres plays Adele in Ms Igwabi's film.](/web/20170312225623im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/s/x/p/3/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gusg10.png/1489146465017.jpg)
She said her parents never pressured her to get married, but she felt the weight of her culture.
"I never thought I would get to 24 without being married," she said.
"My mum got married at 16 and that was normal.
"And all my cousins are married. I'm the only one who isn't married.
"And for my culture, for a 24-year-old, that is terrible.
"Child marriage is massive in Africa. A lot of kids get married at such a young age and I wanted to show people that this still exists.
"Especially when I did research in Australia and found out that there is 62 cases in Australia where there are African kids taken back to get married and come back.
"So I wanted to shine a lot on these girls who just don't have voice."
A year 10 schoolmate of Ms Igwabi's at Yeronga State High was one. She returned to Afghanistan and came back to Australia married.
"She didn't want to tell anyone, but she was forced to get married."
'We should be telling our stories'
Mirene Igwabi's experiences in Australia have given her a clear idea of what she wants to do.
"I want to make films in Africa," Ms Igwabi said.
"Hollywood shouldn't be telling our stories. We should be telling our stories."
Ms Igwabi grew up in Goma, a city on the border of Uganda and Rwanda.
"In 1995 the war began and my brother and my mother and I had to run," she said.
"So we moved from the Congo to my mother's village where she was born, in Bukavu."
As the civil war between the Tutsi and Hutu people continued, the family fled to Uganda, a comparatively safe country in 1998, where they lived as refugees.
"We stayed there for almost 10 years and we followed the whole refugee status and eventually in December 2006 we received advice that we had been accepted in Australia," Ms Igwabi said.
She arrived in Brisbane as a 15-year-old in 2007.
Like thousands of refugee children, she went to Milpera School for several months to learn English and, interestingly, how to swim.
"It was amazing actually because we had so many people from different backgrounds there; from Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan.
"And it was so good to be surrounded by people from so many different countries actually; it felt like home actually, like Africa actually."
She began studying film-making after leaving school, making comedy YouTube video clips, later acting as an Afrobeat dance host and getting a taste for film direction in Perth, where everything was filmed on an iPhone.
She returned to Brisbane, to enrol in the SAE College at West End in 2013. The college now has a permanent film-making link with Yeronga State High School to help refugee students.
Her script for Adele won her the $10,000 prize in Canon's 2015 film grant, which helped her employ a professional crew to make it.
She is now writing a script for a feature film called Shaku.
"He's a boy who has been a boy soldier who was taken away from his family at the age of five," she said.
"He gets adopted by an Australian family and he starts getting post-traumatic stress syndrome."
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