Mediha review - a brutalised Yazidi teen comes of age with a camera

The plight of persecuted minority groups around the world seems to be growing worse. As one form of response, a non-fiction film like Mediha works to make vivid the individual stories of people who might otherwise be reduced to statistics from places that are scarcely on the west's radar.

The Yazidis of Kurdistan have been oppressed by Muslims since the days of the Ottoman Empire. The situation worsened when much of the land where they live was captured by Islamic State. Thousands of women and children were killed or taken prisoner and treated as sex slaves. Those who agreed to convert to Islam were sold as brides. Those who refused were raped; the babies born to the victims disappeared.

The Yazidi girl Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad was 10 in August 2014 when ISIL forces embarked on the second Northern Iraq offensive. IS invaded Mediha's village and violently separated her from her family. She lost her parents (who are believed to among the estimated 5,000 Yazidis killed) and her three brothers. Medihi was abducted and repeatedly sold into sexual servitude.

The American documentarist Hasan Oswald was working in a camp where displaced people in Iraqi Kurdistan sheltered from the conflict after their liberation in 2019. Mediha, then 15, was one of them. Rather than make a straightforward report from a Western perspective, Oswald decided to give Mediha a camera and some basic training in how to use it. It’s her video diary that is woven into Oswald's powerful documentary. She describes what happened to her and tells of her quest to find out what became of her parents and bring her former captors to justice.

Mediha shows the kind of healing that is possible after so much violence and trauma. We see Mediha reunited with her brothers (pictured above) and an uncle. During the five years of the film's making, she develops into a resilient young woman with enormous spirit.

She is reminiscent, in many ways, of brave figures like Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, and Iran's feminist activists. One can only hope that this limited cinema release is effective in helping to bring Mediha's story to a wider audience.

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