Review by Willard Manus

The title of this new documentary is apt, because 24-year old Nadia Murad is indeed carrying the fate of her people on her slim shoulders.

In August, 2014 ISIS invaded the corner of northern Iraq where the Yazidi people had lived for centuries. Claiming that the Yazidis were renegade Muslims, ISIS proceeded to commit genocide. An estimated 5,000 people were killed and over 7000 women and children were captured, forced to become sex slaves and child soldiers. Among the latter was Nadia Murad, who watched her mother and six brothers being murdered before she was taken off and imprisoned in an ISIS bordello.

After her escape, Nadia made it to the West and became a spokesperson for the Yazidis, a tireless and dogged advocate for justice, one who bared her soul in public time and time again in hopes of persuading the powers that be to take action against ISIS.

As ON HER SHOULDERS shows, Nadia was a reluctant media warrior. “I’d much rather be a student, an athlete, a farmer than keep talking about how I was raped or what it was like to see my mother killed,” she says at one point. But despite her reluctance, despite the pain and sadness that are reflected in her soft brown eyes, she bravely soldiers on, giving TV and radio interviews, addressing the House of Commons (in Canada), the United Nations (in New York), marching in an anti-genocide rally (in Berlin), visiting refugee camps in Greece.

Her life is in constant motion. She travels the world, accompanied by her fellow-Yazidi and English-speaking confidant, Murad Ishmael, writing and making speeches, conferring with politicians and civil servants, appearing before women’s groups. It is an exhausting, draining life and a frustrating one as well, if only because the world is slow to come to the aid of her people, is content to let them languish in camps or emigrate in small numbers to countries far from their homes and fields, their communal strength.