Mediha

Mediha is a call to empathy and understanding. A story of horror and hope, of loss and resilience. It invites us to look beyond what we know, the power of Mediha, the young Yazidi girl whose childhood was stolen but found the strength to fight, survive and speak up."Mediha" (2023) struck me deeply. It is staggering how often we forget that behind every war or tragedy there are people with unique and complex stories just like her. Mediha, with her eyes full of courage, reminds us that every number in the statistics represents a broken life, a broken family, a stolen future. Her words are like an urgent call to recognize the humanity. "Mediha" invites us to be more empathetic and to recognize the strength and dignity of victims of atrocities.

Before seeing Mediha, i had some mixes feeling about the movie, especially regarding the overall method. Deciding to give the protagonist a camera is a peculiar choice. You have to trust the subject so much that she will become part of the movie, somehow a second director. Mediha successfully manages to tell her story in a personal way that has no equal, and paradoxically i now think that the method is the major innovative strenght of the movie, together with the heartbreaking, untold, kept-away-from-the-media story. Mediha is one of the most interesting documentaries of this year and i really hope it will find its audience around the world.

Mediha manages to leave you with a sense of awareness and powerlessness towards a girl and, more generally, towards the living conditions of some minority groups who constantly seek peace and justice. Mediha confronts you with an obvious reality that we don't always remember: not everyone has the privilege of living a "normal" life, as we in the Western world perceive it.

Mediha is a teenager who has experienced a life that no ordinary human being should ever dream of living. The right to be a girl, the right to live with her family, the right to live her own identity are some things that Mediha has had to sacrifice due to the situation she has experienced since she was little. But these absences are filled by a willpower and courage that are nothing short of admirable.

I recently had the honor of watching Mediha at a festival and it is one of the most impactful documentaries I have seen. Oswald manages to potray the humanity of Mediha, and brings light to a topic that is never discussed in mainstream media. This documentary proves the struggles many women particuarly living under ISIS rule must endure. This documentary respectfully brings light to such a difficult topic. I could not stop watching or looking at the screen, even with the distressing contents at hand because of how brillant Mediha is. I think this documentary should be shown to lawmakers and activists around the world as it shows the true reality of the daily life of women under Islamic rule. Highly recommend watching when you can.

Towards the ending of the documentary, a woman tells of the hardships that kidnapped Yazidis go through everyday: a never-ending nightmare where one is confronted daily by challenges that people of the western world only know as kind of extreme (but ever so unreal) narrative expedients, e.g. Sophie's choice. The same woman then concludes by affirming that these are truly the most voiceless people she can think of. The importance of Mediha as a documentary, then, must reside in the attempt to make present what is, in reality, absent. Throughout the whole movie, we see all kinds of people deprived of something essential such as a children, a mother, a brother, innocence. And Mediha, in a way, works perfectly as the catalyst of loss: as a daughter she is deprived of her own mother, as a sister (and in a way also as a mother) of her own brother and as a girl she is in constant mourning of her forever lost childhood. To give her the control of the camera, to intersperse glimpses of her life by her own hands, works perfectly, but only because Mediha never wants to stop sharing. What makes her extremely rare and most deserving of the amplification is, in fact, a truly unbreakable sense of resilience, even in the face of her own community telling her just not to talk, and by proxy to think, about the past. Still, she doesn't refuse to suffer, and wears her scars proudly, with a smile. Symbolized by an ending section where brother and sister reunite, and kids run in the sunset, Mediha is a documentary that stuns for the vein of unchained optimism it manages to transmit.