DN:FILM On Her Shoulders
Alexandria Bombach’s doc offers an essentially religious portrait of suffering and courage as it follows twenty-three-year-old Nadia Murad, a human rights advocate who survived ISIS’s 2014 genocide of Northern Iraq’s Yazidis.
Murad, true to the film’s title, carries the enormous weight of telling her story to the world. She does so not without noticeable strain, but, rather, with a undefeated combination of sadness, generosity and dedication that makes her seem alien: not only in the apt, refugee sense of the world, but also otherworldly, ethereal, as if she were a protective shade visiting from the beyond, existing on a plane different than ours. Certainly there is enough pain here to have wrought such a transformation: For three months, Murad was trafficked as a sex slave, repeatedly raped and tortured, while many of her relatives and loved ones from her village were killed. Now, Bombach shows, Murad campaigns relentlessly for global awareness and relief of the atrocities visited upon her people.
Bombach knows what a saintly figure she’s working with, using heartbreaking, lingering closeups of Murad looking directly into the camera and reflecting on her role as messenger about the horrors she endured and witnessed. No less affecting than those art-photographic portraits are the many anodyne home-video moments of Murad shopping for clothes for herself or toys for children, tinkering with the words of a speech, getting her hair done before an interview—unexceptional actions except that Bombach prevents us from forgetting by whom they are being experienced. We follow Murad through her mission, speaking to the UN (she was named the first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking), visiting Yazidi refugee camps, fielding well-meaning but cringe-inducing, invasive interview after interview, meeting one-on-one with politicians, all with the goals of bringing justice and resolution to the Yazidi and calling for the elimination of the Islamic State. As the doc progresses, Murad becomes allied with international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, with whom she works to bring ISIS before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
A hero to her people, Murad has had tremendous impact as a figure, as a spokeswoman, as a storyteller; after the conclusion of the film, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “As a girl, I wish I didn’t have to tell the people this happened to me,” she says. “I mean, I wish it hadn’t happened to me so I wouldn’t have to talk about it.” She says she wishes she were known simply as an excellent seamstress, as an excellent athlete, as an excellent makeup artist, as an excellent farmer. Instead, she is known for what she does on a remarkably elevated level. As an opportunity to spend time with someone whose bravery and endurance go beyond what most of us can begin to fathom, “On Her Shoulders” is extraordinary.