Mediha Survived Capture By ISIS – This New Film Allows Her To Reclaim Her Narrative 

“I had been interested in the power balance between filmmaker and participant, and I was interested in ways to redistribute the power,” says director Hasan Oswald, as he sits next to Mediha – the protagonist of his latest documentary of the same name. The two are telling me about their work on the film. “I knew that to have a collaboration like that would take a remarkable partner, and I always say that I found the one in a million that could have made this story what it ended up being,” adds Oswald.

Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad is a young Yazidi woman from Sinjar, Iraqi Kurdistan. When ISIS claimed certain regions of Iraq in 2014 after US troops began leaving the country, they carried out a brutal genocide against minorities such as Christians and Yazidis. ISIS killed thousands of men and women, kidnapped young boys to train as soldiers, and trafficked women and girls into sexual slavery. Mediha was one of these girls.  

Mediha was rescued aged 13, having spent four years in captivity. At this time, her youngest brother Barzan was still missing, as well as her mother, Afaf, and father Ibrahim (who is presumed dead). Mediha, directed by Oswald and executive produced by Emma Thompson, follows the young woman and two of her brothers as they try to adjust to ‘normal’ life after the region was liberated from ISIS in 2015, and it documents the attempts at rescuing both Barzan and Afaf.

Oswald avoids the tropes of documentary filmmaking in Mediha. Instead of pointing his lens at Mediha and her family, Oswald and his team handed her a camera so that she could narrate her own story. We see the world through Mediha’s eyes, rather than a Western-centric gaze. Mediha tells me of her pride at being Yazidi: “My community, they are very small, they don’t do bad stuff, and that’s why I like my village, my culture and the people. But they need so much support.”

Mediha and Oswald met at a camp for IDP (Internally Displaced People) in Kurdistan. “When I [met] Mediha, she was shy... but she wasn’t like a lot of the other women and girls who had returned,” he says. “Some of them are, of course, tragically shadows of themselves, and some are non-verbal – catatonic, almost. [Mediha] had this spark. I always say that she was funny, and Mediha says, ‘No, I wasn’t funny.’ She was very funny. She was witty, charismatic and interested in the cameras and interested in talking to us.”

When the director handed the cameras over and taught Mediha and her brothers Ghazan and Adnan the basics of filmmaking, the team didn’t know what would come of it. Meanwhile, Oswald was embedded in the rescue team looking for Mediha’s other family members. “I thought [the rescue] would drive the narrative,” he explains. “And this home video stuff [by Mediha] would play some role creatively, maybe transitions or vignettes,” he tells me. But when they retrieved the footage back, not only was Mediha “intuitively framing, [her] cinematography was amazing... her ability to reflect, and her ability and her willingness to speak out [meant that] from then on, she took the reins of the narrative.” 

What Mediha accurately points out to me is the lingering effects of the genocide, “I want to show people the Yazidi story... because it’s still [ongoing], the genocide,” she explains. And this tension between what Mediha went through as a captive, and what is acceptable to vocalise within the Yazidi community once women return from sex slavery, creates a main point of tension in the film.

For Mediha, handling the camera was not only an exercise in practicing filmmaking, it became her mouthpiece – a way for her to reclaim her story. “I told [Oswald] to give me the camera,” Mediha recollects. “I want to make a movie... I [didn’t] have a friend or best friend. That’s why I did a movie... it was my best friend, the camera.”

As inspiring as Mediha’s strength is, the film is undoubtedly heartbreaking, when we consider the fact that 2,600 Yazidis are still in captivity or missing. Mediha is not a cliche film that forces happy endings – it is filled with the bittersweetness of reality in Iraqi Kurdistan. When, after many years, Mediha is finally able to identify her ISIS captor – Abu Yousef – the local police responsible for Yazidi rescue are able to open a case for her, but it’s clear from the outset that the likelihood of justice for Mediha is heart-wrenchingly slim. Still, there is some gratification for Mediha in the scene, as she yells out, “It’s him!”, when scouring through images of ISIS members.

“It’s very personal stuff,” Mediha admits, “and Hasan told me, ‘If you want to, we are going to [blur Abu Yousef’s] face’. I told him, ‘No. I want to show his face,’ because I want to find him. I want to have justice.”  

Empowering Mediha to make these choices herself feels central to the overall project, which reaches beyond the impact of what we watch on screen. She very much drove the narrative of the production, Oswald explains, which is why the film ends up feeling so real.

Today, Mediha is enjoying her freedom, independence and agency – living and studying in Brooklyn, New York. “I was living in the Bronx and then I moved to Williamsburg,” she says. “I go to school and take the subway. It’s a busy city, but it’s great.” There, she’s studying to be a human rights lawyer: “It is my dream. I want to make justice, for me and for my community. And not just for my community... I want to make sister[s]. It doesn’t matter [if they are] Yazidi or not Yazidi, I’m going to help her and support her because I [needed] support so badly too when I was child. I love to help women and girls... not just family, [but] around the world.”

Mediha is showing at selected Picturehouse Cinemas around the UK, and has screenings at locations in New York. You can find dates and tickets here