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Watch Jon Ossoff's Documentary 'Girls, Guns & ISIS'
The special election to replace former Rep. Tom Price in Georgia's sixth congressional district has turned a lot of attention on the unexpectedly prominent Democratic candidate. The 30-year-old Jon Ossoff, who's looking to flip the district blue for the first time since the 1970s, is a former congressional aide and legislative expert, but he also had a successful career producing investigative films. You can watch Jon Ossoff's company's documentary Girls, Guns & ISIS, to see some of the work that the congressional candidate has done outside Capital Hill.
According to his LinkedIn page, Ossoff has been the managing director & CEO at Insight TWI since 2013. It's a production company that makes documentaries, particularly about issues of global conflict. The position was quite a shift from of Ossoff's earlier work, when he served as a campaign manager and senior legislative assistant for former congressional representative Hank Johnson.
However, the body of work that Ossoff has produced in the last four years is equally impressive. Some of Insight TWI's other films include Living with Ebola, People and Power: Killing Kenya, and The Battle for Africa. One of the most impactful films produced under Ossoff's tenure at the company profiled some of the women on the front lines of the fight against the most notorious terrorist group operating in the world today.
Stacey on the Frontline: Girls, Guns, and ISIS, released in 2016, follows an all-female battalion of soldiers who are fending off ISIS in Afghanistan. According to the film's official website, 50,000 members of the Yazidi, an ethnic group that historically lived in northern Afghanistan, were forced to leave their homes due to ISIS' advances in the region in 2014. While fleeing, many women were captured and tortured, but were ultimately inspired to fight back against ISIS when they escaped. The film follows those women as they learn to be soldiers and help each other heal their emotional wounds, too. The entire documentary is on YouTube, and it's a relatively short watch at just over an hour and 20 minutes. Whether or not you're supporting Ossoff politically, Girls, Guns & ISIS seems like a worthwhile watch either way.
The dozen or so films should give you a good idea of Ossoff's ideas on international politics, and if he ends up having a career in Congress, that view could come to impact the entire nation's foreign policy.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated Ossoff had published a novel. That report was false. The author Jon Ossoff is not the Jon Ossoff running for Congress.