‘Nobody would listen to me, so I told the camera’: film of Islamic State survivor’s story premieres in UK

Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad, a teenaged Yazidi girl and subject of the documentary Mediha. She spent years as a captive of Islamic State fighters. ‘I used the camera to heal,’ she says. Photograph: LoveWorld Media

The horrors Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad experienced during her three years of Islamic State captivity is something she will never forget. She was just 10 when she was kidnapped from her home in Sinjar, in northern Iraq, in the summer of 2014, and sold into sexual slavery among IS fighters. Yet when she was released, she felt “nobody would listen to me”.

Mediha, now 19, has since found solace in film after she was given a camera by the US documentary film-maker Hasan Oswald, who she met at a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) five years ago, while he was reporting in the region. She started telling her family’s story, as well as documenting the challenges she faced after captivity – a process she says “saved my life”.