When director Hasan Oswald first met Iraqi-Yazidi teenager Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad, it had been one year since she was rescued from ISIS. The terrorist group had held her captive from the ages of 10 to 13 — but despite the unspeakable horrors she experienced, there was a joyful spark in her that stooped Oswald in his tracks.
“It’s hard to explain to someone who’s not familiar with this community, but other girls and women who have been through this, some of them are catatonic. Some of them are mute. Most of them are just shadows of the people they used to be. None of them are like Mediha,” Oswald tells MovieMaker.
In Mediha, a new documentary directed by Oswald and executive produced by Emma Thompson, the teenager speaks directly to the camera, unraveling the trauma she accrued during the four years she spent in the hands of ISIS militants. The film screened Thursday at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival in Middlebury, Vermont, where it won the festival’s Hernandez/Bayliss Prize for Triumph of the Human Spirit.
Now age 19, Mediha’s goal is to spread awareness about her people, the Yazidis — an oft-oppressed religious group native to Northern Iraq. She was 10 years old when her family was captured by ISIS during its invasion of Iraq in 2014 — a period that has become known as the Yazidi genocide.
Separated from her parents and three brothers, Mediha was sold as property to four different men during the years she spent in ISIS captivity.
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“It’s a coming of age story of a young girl in the foothills of Iraq, and hopefully, through that, you find out about the Yazidi people and ISIS and the atrocities they committed,” Oswald says.
Oswald found Mediha through his producer, Annelise Mecca, who was running a photography workshop for Yazidi girls living in an IDP camp for displaced people in Kurdistan. Following the curiosity of Mediha’s younger brother, Ghazwan, Mecca brought Oswald back to their tent. That’s when he met Mediha for the first time.
“Sitting in the corner was little old Mediha, already playing with our cameras, asking questions, saying jokes,” Oswald tells MovieMaker.
What sets this film apart from other documentaries is Oswald’s decision to turn over the camera to the subject herself. He didn’t want to be another filmmaker not native to the region taking over her narrative — he wanted to tell the story through Mediha’s eyes. So, he gave her a camera and showed her how to use it.
‘I Trusted the Camera,’ Mediha Says
“It was strange. But when I filmed by myself, it felt so good,” Mediha tells MovieMaker. “I felt like it was my best friend. I trusted the camera.”
Now, she is living safely in the U.S. This week, she became officially recognized as an asylum seeker, meaning that she’s safe from deportation. She currently lives in New York, where she’s studying to get her GED before applying to colleges.
She has big dreams for her future.
“I want to be a lawyer, because I want to help women and girls around the world,” she says. “It was my dream to help Yazidi people, the girls and women especially. I want to make justice.”
Mediha is Oswald’s second documentary feature following his 2020 film Higher Love about a blue-collar worker’s journey to rescue his heroin-addicted girlfriend from the streets of Camden, New Jersey.
“I was looking for a documentary story. I knew what I wanted to talk about — the Yazidi genocide and the fact that there are still 3,000 missing,” he said.
Mediha’s mother is one of them. The documentary follows not only a teenage girl’s journey towards healing, but her family’s continued search to recover the Yazidis who are still in the hands of ISIS.
“I don’t know if there’s anyone in the world who could have carried a film like this other than Mediha,” Oswald says. “She’s truly remarkable, not only in the resilience she showed, but how she carried that through the filmmaking process.”
The filmmaker and his subject still hold out hope that someone watching the doc will recognize her mother, Afaf, and let her know that her family is looking for her.
“Some people don’t know about the Yazidis, my culture, my religion,” Mediha says. “I want more people to know about the Yazidis and the genocide… I made this for my people, the girls. Not just for me.”
Mediha will be making its theatrical premiere in New York City and Los Angeles in mid-October. Find out more about the film at its website here.
Main Image: Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad, courtesy of Oswald.