Mediha

2023 [KURDISH]

Documentary

2
IMDb Rating 7.3/10 10 113 113

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Plot summary

A teenager from northern Iraq, Mediha is a member of the Yazidi ethnic and religious minority. She’s also the survivor of an ISIS-orchestrated genocide in 2014. Through video diaries, Mediha provides an intimate account of her grief and trauma. The portrait that emerges leaves us in awe of the budding activist, who has already lived many lives and is nowhere near done.

Director

Hasan Oswald Photo
Hasan Oswald

Top cast

Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad Photo
Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad as Self
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
834.55 MB
1280*720
Kurdish 2.0
NR
Subtitles
23.976 fps
1 hr 30 min
Seeds 6
1.51 GB
1920*1080
Kurdish 2.0
NR
Subtitles
23.976 fps
1 hr 30 min
Seeds 5

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by leandriandrea 8 / 10

An alternative approach

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.
Reviewed by davidecido 8 / 10

An important telling of powerful stories

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.
Reviewed by JvH48 8 / 10

Complications around getting women home after being stolen by ISIS and lived in slavery. Their return with children born during their ISIS time, knows no easy solutions

Saw this at the Movies That Matter 2024 filmfestival in The Hague. Lots of issues pass by in this story. Women who return after having lived years under ISIS are not always accepted by their original society, for two reasons. (1) They are generally converted (forcefully, but still) to Islam, something in their (Yazidi) beliefs you cannot simply shake off. (2) Children who came forth from their life within ISIS, are separated from their natural mother and she cannot keep them with her. Such obstacles result in alienating these women from their hometown and their own people, depriving them from a useful future. What are these women to do??Apart from that, when trying to get these women back, it proves very difficult to find them. They usually receive new names, thereby destroying all traces back to their original life. Also, they are often sold more than once, so following their tracks is far from trivial. So-called rescuers are needed as an intermediary. We see part of this demonstrated when searching for Mediha's lost brother. Eventually they find him in Turkey, where his current "parents" are willing to give him away when granted amnesty for their ISIS misdeeds. His return is not easy for him, however, as he seriously misses his "mother". He weeps all day long while suffering homesickness. For him, this homecoming, albeit happy for the family wanting him back, works out as a stressful event. Understandably, he cannot see the big picture and cannot realize this new family is his actual natural family. Moreover, he must unlearn Turkish too, an extra complication in communicating with him.Another angle is prosecuting the ISIS-men who stole these women from their home in the first place, forcing them into slavery, and even selling them to other men within ISIS. Some numbers were reported about cases where it was possible to identify the men in question. Alas, it was a disappointingly low number (say a handful in total). In other words, another avenue without success.Finally, the women in question usually don't talk freely about their experiences, mostly due to commonly untreated and ignored PTSS. The main protagonist in this movie was relatively unique, being able to speak about what happened, in fact a rare example. She was able to pinpoint her captor within a long series of photos shown to her, a tedious session but it had to be done as starting point for the search. Not all women can endure this, without getting overwhelmed by emotions or PTSS.All in all, a solid and multi-facetted overview to demonstrate the difficulties in this field. Undoing the wrongs involved, is met with very many obstacles, not alone for practical reasons but also because of cultural and religious principles. The movie's urgent message shows clearly that solutions are far away.
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