On Her Shoulders

Alexandria Bombach - 2018 - United States - 94 min

Twenty-three-year-old Nadia Murad’s life is a dizzying array of exhausting undertakings—from giving testimony before the U.N. to visiting refugee camps to soul-bearing media interviews and one-on-one meetings with top government officials. With deep compassion and a formal precision and elegance that matches Nadia’s calm and steely demeanor, filmmaker Alexandria Bombach follows this strong-willed young woman, who survived the 2014 genocide of the Yazidis in Northern Iraq and escaped the hands of ISIS to become a relentless beacon of hope for her people, even when at times she longs to lay aside this monumental burden and simply have an ordinary life.

Nadia is a human rights activist, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018—along with Denis Mukwege—for “their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” She is the recipient of the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize and the Sakharov Prize, and the UN’s first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. She has also received the Clinton Global Citizen Award, Peace Prize from the United Nations Association of Spain, and was named 2016 Woman of the Year by Glamour Magazine. Since 2015, Nadia has been working to bring ISIS before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

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Director: Alexandria Bombach

Alexandria Bombach is an award-winning cinematographer, editor, and director from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her first feature-length documentary, FRAME BY FRAME, follows the lives of four Afghan photojournalists who are facing the realities of building Afghanistan’s first free press. The film had its world premiere at SXSW 2015, went on to winmore than twenty-fivefilm festival awards and screened in front of the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani. Alexandria continued her work in Afghanistan in 2016,directing the Pulitzer Center-supported New York TimesOp-Doc, Afghanistan by Choice, an intertwining portrait of five Afghans who must weigh the costs of leaving or staying as the country’s security deteriorates. In addition to her feature documentary work, Alexandria’s production company RED REEL has been producing award-winning, character-driven stories since 2009. Her 2013 filmCOMMON GROUND unearths the emotion behind a proposed wilderness-area addition for a community in Montana as heritage and tradition are seemingly defended on both sides. Her Emmy award-winning 2012 series MoveShake captured the internal conflicts of people dedicating their lives to a cause.