On Her Shoulders

On Her Shoulders (2018)

Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi, survived genocide and sexual slavery committed by ISIS. Repeating her story to politicians and media, this ordinary girl finds herself thrust onto the world stage as the voice of her people. Away from the podium, she must navigate bureaucracy, fame and people's good intentions.

Date of release
2018-12-06
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (14)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Alexandria Bombach

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Sundance U.S. Directing Award: Documentary

On Her Shoulders is a 2018 American documentary film. It was directed by Alexandria Bombach and produced by Hayley Pappas, Brock Williams and Elizabeth Schaeffer Brown under the banner of RYOT Films. The film follows Iraqi Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad on her three-month tour of Berlin, New York, and Canada, as she met with politicians and journalists to alert the world to the massacres and kidnapping happening in her native land. In 2014, at the age of 19, Murad had been kidnapped with hundreds of other women and girls by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and held as a sex slave; she managed to escape.

Production

RYOT FILMS was introduced to Nadia Murad by the Former ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo and Entrepreneur Elizabeth Schaeffer Brown, who initiated a campaign to bring ISIS to the ICC. In 2015, film director Alexandria Bombach first heard about Murad, after seeing her UN Security Council speech. In July 2016, RYOT Films reached out to Bombach to direct a short film about Murad.

Bombach began filming Murad in 2016. Principal photography took place in Berlin, New York, and Canada over a period of three months, as the crew followed Murad around on her meetings with politicians and journalists in an effort to alert the world to the massacres and kidnapping going on in her native land, in addition the director had no idea what was going to happen day to day.

Bombach said this was the hardest film she had ever made. She added: "It was like losing some humanity myself by not putting the camera down and being able to hug this person". Whilst filming, Bombach recalls, "I had a mic on Nadia for a lot of the time and I was on a long lens, so I was hearing what people were saying to her. Sometimes I wanted to push those people away from her.

Before beginning editing, Bombach received a Skype call from RYOT to confirm that she would be producing a short profile of Murad, and Bombach said she lied to them. She spent the next six weeks editing the film in her parents' garage in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

After finishing the editing of the 95-minute film, Bombach called Bryn Mooser, CEO of RYOT Films; she recalls being terrified to confess that she had made a feature film. The phone call lasted about an hour, and in the end, Mooser said yes to a feature film. After receiving the CEO's approval, the editing group did not send the film to the spring film festivals so they could spend more time polishing the editing.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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