‘Mediha’ Review: A Young Yazidi Woman’s Harrowing Quest to Reclaim Her Past

Lovia Gyarkye
·5 min read
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Hasan Oswald’s Mediha opens with its subject — a 15-year-old Yazidi girl who recently escaped from ISIS slavery — chasing beauty. She tries to get the attention of a painted lady butterfly perched on a dandelion stalk by making kissing noises with her mouth. When the insect flies away, the dutiful teenager follows it to another flower.

In the next scene, Mediha introduces us to her shadow and the refugee camp, tucked in the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq, that she calls home. She’s lived here for two years with her younger brothers Ghazwan and Adnan, whom we meet as they’re playing with chicks. When Mediha finally turns the camera to herself, her rounded, youthful face flashes in front of the screen before disappearing behind the camera. She announces that she needs to be alone, to go somewhere no one can hear her.

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Where does Mediha go in these moments? This is the central question of Oswald’s revelatory but painful documentary about the teenager’s life in the aftermath of slavery and genocide. The film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC and counts Emma Thompson among its executive producers, composes a tender portrait of its young subject. Oswald doesn’t just chronicle Mediha’s unique struggle for legal recourse against the ISIS soldiers who enslaved her; he also gives the teenager a chance to reclaim her story. The documentary operates at a minor and meditative key, but its urgent message still rings loudly.

Before Mediha was sold into slavery, she lived in the sleepy town of Sinjar with her mother, father and three younger brothers. In 2014, Islamic State forces invaded their village. The soldiers were on a genocidal mission to eradicate the Yazidi people, a religious minority whose faith blends traditional Islamic beliefs with ancient Persian and Eastern Mediterranean ones. An early title card explains how Yazidi men were murdered and their bodies dumped into mass graves, the young boys trained to be child soldiers and the women and girls forced into sexual slavery.

The ramifications of this attempted extermination and invasion of the Yazidi holy land reverberate throughout the region today. At the beginning of the doc, Mediha lives with her two brothers (their uncle rescued them from ISIS slavery and conscription) and is still searching for her mother, Afaf, and her youngest brother, Bazan. They are among the thousands of still missing Yazidis.

What does this kind of violence do to a people and its children? Mediha makes this question — often abstracted for the comfort of international audiences — more concrete by putting the camera in its subject’s hands. Oswald’s documentary bifurcates Mediha’s story into two discrete, intimate and emotionally visceral threads.

The first, styled as a thriller, chronicles the attempts of professional rescuers to locate Mediha’s mother and brother and the teenager’s decision to seek out legal recourse. It’s within this sprawling but arresting narrative that Oswald offers the geopolitical context for the Yazidi genocide, and explains how few of its victims ever find freedom or justice. The documentary covers the dangerous system that rescue teams must navigate in order to retrieve Islamic State captives — some of whom have been forced to change their names or sold into Turkish slavery — and takes viewers into the heart of al-Hol, an ISIS controlled camp in northeast Syria, where many Yazidi women and children live with soldiers. The environment is hostile to outsiders, who must employ covert tactics to communicate with spies within the camp for what usually amounts to morsels of information. Within the first thread, Oswald also chronicles Mediha’s attempts to open a formal investigation against her ISIS captor. The process requires the teenager to recount painful memories to the police, some of which she’s tried to forget.

Although both threads cover critical information, it’s in the second one that Mediha offers what few documentaries covering this region’s conflicts do. The footage that Mediha shoots of daily life in the camp pulsates with a devastating optimism. Here we have a teenager failed by society and subsequently silenced by community. Her grief, isolation and rage are palpable, but she conceals herself in public settings, adopting a detached posture read by adults as a sign of maturity. Still, she seeks out beauty and presents images of butterflies perched on dandelions, scenes of the mountains and moments with her brothers swimming, running and playing.

Mediha’s attempts to recover her narrative and heal from some of the psychological trauma are thwarted by the grown-ups who insist she forget. She is understandably withholding about the more painful parts of her captivity, but the silences within her sections of the doc communicate their grip on her spirit. As Mediha becomes more comfortable in front of the camera, we see how often the young woman retreats into herself. There are few spaces in the camp where she can express her feelings, and even fewer pockets of time to metabolize them. She spends most days caring for her younger brothers, whose rage against the Islamic State manifests in promises to become militants and kill their captors. Within them, the doc traces the illogic of military force and shows how violence only begets more violence.

This thread of Mediha captures, with an understated compassion, how the teenager and her brothers navigate collective grief. They pray for a reunion with the rest of their family and dream vividly of their village. By entrusting Mediha with the camera, Oswald has given her and her brothers an opportunity to exercise hope. They in turn have offered audiences a sacred invitation. There’s a moment, early in the doc, when Mediha wakes one of her brothers from sleep. She asks: “Did you dream of Sinjar?” He responds, with a smile on his face: “I hope we’ll return to our village so we can remember our past.” After watching Mediha, it’s impossible to not share that desire.

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