oswaldhasan

In the summer of 2014 Mediha was just ten when ISIS attacked and killed thousands of the small ethnic and religious Yazidi community in Sinjar in Northern Iraq: her father most likely killed, the fate of her mother unknown, she and her three little brothers kidnapped; she was sold into sexual slavery by IS fighters before being rescued three years later and reunited with her two younger brothers Ghazwan and Adnan and her uncle. The documentary film maker Hasan Oswald met her in a camp for internally displaced people and gave her a camera through which she tells her and her family's story. Severely traumatised she said it 'saved her life' because coming back, she and other female survivors are asked to be silent, not to talk openly about the tortures they were put through, to put all behind them and forget: impossible of course. An older man talking to Ghazwan and Adnan, says that she has become like a mother, a brother, a father to them. The immense humanity in the best sense of the word shown by the survivors who speak in this film.

The documentary ends with her youngest brother, Barzan, kidnapped when he was still a toddler, being traced in Turkey to an IS family and reunited after 5 years with his siblings not speaking their language and desperately longing for his Turkish 'mother', comforted by Mediha.
The technical glitches were not cut out: a good decision! (III-24) 5*

An outline of her story is told here: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/mar/12/mediha-film-yazidi-is...

A video of the Interview with Mediha, the director and producers at the DOC NYC film festival in Nov. 2023 is available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fTdtqmiPDA… (plus d'informations)