There's an extraordinarily blunt title card that appears about five minutes into “Mediha,” by which time you've already met the 15-year-old Iraqi girl of the title who now lives in a refugee camp with her younger brothers Ghazwan and Adnan and their uncle Omar, who saved them.
A credit reports that filmmaking responsibilities were split between Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad and director Hasan Oswald, although you'd know it from the first-person camera work on the ground as Mediha explores her surroundings and from the sky, Oswald deploys drones to capture shots of the lush green hills from above where sheep roam - both views are unlikely to be the kind of images you've seen before in the west, and although Mediha dances around the horrors that have led her to resettle in the region, her parents absent , who she can only assume are dead, there is no way to escape a bold warning, in capital letters, that her entire heritage has been systematically destroyed as a member of the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi community, with all adult men targeted for execution by As part of ISIS, women and girls sold into slavery and young children were separated and incorporated into the Islamic State to maintain the cycle of violence in perpetuity.
Director: Hasan Oswald
Writer: Hasan Oswald
Star: Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad
In that context, the click of the camera that can be heard when the screen goes black is the most powerful weapon at Mediha's disposal, documenting her life in exile where, even in a place where it seems no one cares about her, She still feels inhibited by not accompanying her brothers when they go swimming because it would be indecent, and her mind still holds memories of being held captive by ISIS when she was 10, which she tries her best to forget. "Mediha" is not the first to look at the relentless and atrocious persecution of the Yazidis, although the most notable previous attempt "Sabaya", which took a similar first-person approach, became mired in ethical questions when its subjects were said not to have wanted to participate in the film. Having assumed too much before, I'm reluctant to write too much about the nature of the collaboration between Oswald and Alhamad, although as presented, the director only seems willing to delve into Mediha's memory as much as she wants about her past and discovers Surge a fascinating conflict when memories can help his brother Barzhan, who disappeared when his parents did and is now believed to have been one of many orphans sold to families in Turkey.
Although Mediha is able to show a rare side to the ongoing humanitarian tragedy by simply keeping her camera rolling, Oswald begins following Barzhad, who is recruited to track down Barzhan based on a handful of clues and folders full of past investigations that can help. to inform. simply through a process of elimination.
As Mediha confesses at one point, she thought her family had been through the worst until she learned what her neighbors had gone through in the camps, and although the film largely refrains from explicitly recounting the horrors suffered by the Yazidis to honoring Mediha's own discretion, brings its impact on those who continue to subsist to the surface before finding their way to the Al-Hol refugee camp in northern Syria, where it is believed that Barzhan or even his mother Afaf could be among many others. Whether the search for the missing people is successful or not is beside the point when you can feel the massive scale of what has already been lost and by looking through the eyes of Mediha, who has the sophisticated perspective of an adult to cost of having nothing. true childhood, it poignantly becomes a burden that can be shared rather than weighing solely on her shoulders.
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