At the end of 2024, I got the chance to visit a destination that confused my insurance agent a lot: Iraqi Kurdistan, where I was invited as a juror for the 11th Duhok International Film Festival. As I was informed, the region wasn’t covered by my insurance company (based in the EU) due to the high level of terrorism and the fact that most of the European Union countries advise their citizens against traveling there. Yet as a Ukrainian refugee, I was not a European Union citizen, so I decided to take the risk and accepted the invitation, which resulted in one of the most insightful festival experiences of my life.
Kurdistan is a geo-cultural region divided between Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria, with a significant diaspora of Kurds based in Europe. United by the strong sense of national identity, Kurdish people find themselves in very different political, socio-economic, and cultural circumstances. Every journalist attempting to cover the Kurdish POV ends up in a difficult position as each statement should be double thought through so as not to provoke authorities of the countries Kurdistan is divided between, and at the same time, highlight the diverse perspectives of Kurdish people.
Though navigating through politics has evidently become a part of the film critic’s job these days, the focus of my interest in Duhok was defined early on after I started researching the festival and its history. On every picture and video posted on the festival’s social media, there were men. A lot of men. Hall full of men, men on stage, men on the red carpet, men at press conference… Women were very few, and most of them were international guests. I couldn’t help but assume that the situation on screen would not be very different and that I had to analyze female representation in modern Kurdish cinema. As I was a juror for national features, this was going to be a great opportunity for investigation.
Upon receiving the program, I discovered that 6 of 8 films were directed by men, with only two female directors in the competition (both based in the EU). Yet it was but a start. To analyze anything, one has to have the presence of that thing in the first place, however, what I faced was almost the full absence of female characters in the films! In a world owned by men, women barely had any space and virtually no voice, acting as mere decoration for the men’s lives and stories. Only in two films (aforementioned works by Kurdish female directors based in Europe), were women chosen as protagonists.
The disturbing situation in cinema is but a reflection of the reality. Despite the festival taking the best care of international guests, it was hard for us to ignore the fact that women were practically not visible in public spaces, as well as few among the festival team. Another curious observation was the way traditional female Kurdish dress was fashioned. For the closing ceremony, I decided to wear one and was taken aback when told that long sleeves should be tied down behind my back, thus restricting my moves. Truly unique design, yet too clear of a message!
Many international guests were dissatisfied with the representation of the female characters in the opening film, The Hope by Orhan Ince (Kurdistan-Turkey, 2024). Curious to discover female voices in local films, I found it tragically symbolic that the very first movie I watched had a deaf and dumb female character, Zeyno, a sister of the male protagonist. Set in a rural area (yet another distinctive feature of most Kurdish films), the film tells the story of a motherless family in financial struggle. Zeyno’s older brother, Çeto, dreams of getting married, and that’s how we got introduced to a second female character of the story. Though she can hear and speak, it doesn’t provide us with much more information about her, as those few times she appears on screen we mainly see her through the prism of a classic “male gaze”: Çeto watches her pictures on his phone, admiring her beauty.
The tendency continued in the next films, among them Sakar by Ebrahim Saeedi (Kurdistan-Iran, 2024). An emotionally intense story of the Kurdish boy Sakar who found the bomb and deified it kept the audience at the edge of their seats. As the narrative unfolds, we observe how deep post-war trauma gradually manifests itself in an innocent child and affects his judgments and actions. In this masculine world, there is no space for soothing mother’s care: introduced at the beginning of the story, Sakar’s mother, much like the girl from the previous film, is not able to speak. She suffers from the consequences of chemical attacks and dies early on in the story.
It was all the more interesting to see how in the next film we watched, “When The Walnut Leaves Turn Yellow” by Mehmet Ali Konar (Kurdistan-Turkey, 2024), the male protagonist suffers from a similar terminal disease, yet for him it becomes a prompt for a moving father-son relationship story, and creates a poignant premature coming-of-age drama. One of the strongest in the competition, this film shares the complexity of sorrow and emotional battles departing father and his son that is forced to grow up and take responsibility for the family are going through. It was not surprising though that both the wife and daughter of the protagonist are not involved in this internal conflict and mutual spiritual growth: the wife mostly appears in the kitchen, and together with the young daughter she stays unaware of the drama her husband and son are going through.
Yet other male-oriented emotional and spiritual conflicts were presented to us through features “Migration” by Moshfegh Shojaei (Kurdistan-Iran, 2024) and “Scenarist” by Sami Sabah (Kurdistan-Iraq, 2024). The first one is a surprising genre movie, unravelling the unexpected mystical realism hidden in the rocky and dusty Zagros mountains. The main protagonist, a middle-aged man, goes on a hopeless escape journey through the treacherous desert. Inspired by Sufi folklore, it could have been a truly memorable story of spiritual transformation. Yet the lack of experience emanates from films of Kurdish filmmakers attempting to tackle genre films, and though the setting and philosophical context reminded me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” and “Stalker,” the naïve acting and superficial dialogues made it impossible to consider this film for any award or even special mention. In “Migration,” women appeared just a vague memory of the protagonist, accusing him of the abuse he did in the past.
In Scenarist we finally see a slightly changing dynamic with a female character who, being financially independent, offers to support a protagonist, an aspiring screenwriter who dreams of making his first author film. However, society mocks this idea and provokes the screenwriter to lose his temper and get in the fight to stand up for his “male dignity”. At the same time, the successful woman he’s in love with dreams of nothing more than being in a relationship and sees it as an ultimate goal.
As soon as we moved to the films made by the Kurdish directors in Europe, the paradigm changed. In “A Happy Day” by Hisham Zaman (Norway, 2023), the main character is a teenage boy Hamid (convincing performance by Salah Qadi) who is about to be deported to his home country from the detention center in Norway. Together with other refugee boys, he contrives an escape plan that falls apart the moment a runaway rebellious girl arrives at their northern abode. From that point on, the powerful feminine energy of Aida (Sarah Aman Mentzoni) is taking the lead in the narrative. Her eccentric behavior and fearless provocations leave enough space for emotional vulnerability, and this vivid mixture shakes the world of Hamid and makes him rethink his intention of leaving the detention center behind. The film was chosen as a FIPRESCI (International Film Critics’ Federation) winner and equally touched jurors of Kurdish, European, and North American origin.
Even more provocative was the film “Winners” by Soleen Yusef (Germany, 2024). The lead character, 11-year-old Mona, along with her Kurdish family, has fled Syria and landed in Berlin. Apart from losing home, what she misses the most is street football, and soon she joins a school team and starts a fight for other girls’ respect (most of them also refugees). With a difficult past, going through the most turbulent years, they are going from one conflict to another to finally tame the aggression and pain and learn what it means to be a team. Multiple straightforward political messages seemed out of place in this energetic teenage adventure movie; perhaps that’s why despite an empowering script and superb technical implementation it won neither awards nor the hearts of juries.
It was different with the last film in the Kurdish features competition, “The Virgin and A Child” by Binevsa Berivan (Belgium, 2024) which won a Best Script along with the Best Actress in Kurdish Cinema awards. The film tells us the story of Avesta (Hevin Tekin), a young Kurdish-Yazidi woman and ISIS survivor who winds up in Brussels to wreak vengeance upon the man who enslaved her and whose child she bears as evidence of crimes he committed. At first, the emotional struggle that Avesta is going through seems too much to cope with, yet everything changes thanks to the nurturing support of the refugee center encounters: Kurdish coordinator, Belgian social worker, and a Balkan refugee roommate. Thanks to their gentle motherly care that most of the characters from previous movies were derived of, the young woman transforms her anger into forgiveness, and aversion to the bastard child into acceptance and compassion.
Despite certain optimistic tendencies, in most of the Kurdish films women appeared as mere shadows in the strictly masculine world and were deprived of the emotional complexity and right to have their own perspectives.
During its 11th edition, the Duhok Film Festival had a focus on Indian cinema. It was interesting to realize that earlier this year, when I was covering Indian entries in the Golden Globes, the opposite tendency in the national cinema was too obvious, as the overwhelming majority of Indian productions were focused solely on women, with male characters either merely present or depicted in a rather negative way.
With everything being said, I felt the Duhok festival was truly supportive of the idea of promoting gender equality. The current unbalanced situation observed in Kurdish cinema is clearly a result of complex historical and cultural processes that the region is still going through. Just 10 years ago, there were practically no cinemas in Kurdistan. People are still recovering from the damage done by ISIS and other forces oppressing Kurds, and the festival mission of presenting Kurdistan as a safe, rapidly developing as opposed to traditionally marginalized region is facing a lot of fears and biases.
It was always a tough place to live in, and be it in Iraq, Iran, Syria, or Turkey, Kurds incessantly had to fight for their right to exist. Currently, having their autonomy within the Iraqi state and certain liberty to decide for themselves, they are making an attempt to build a more just, open-minded, and diverse society. In the welcome speech, Duhok Governor introduced the city as a “place of co-existence”. The festival is doing impossible, including in the program films that would never pass censorship in other Muslim countries, for one, a short film about a transgender soldier, as well as documentaries highlighting female agenda in the patriarchal society.
Yet it takes time for the fundamental changes to happen. The key factor in speeding up the improvement for Kurdish women, both on screen and in real life, is to stretch a helping hand and prompt necessary changes. Solidarity between women disregarding age, nationality, and religion is not just an inspiring concept, it is a real, efficient tool to profoundly change the lives of our sisters around the world. The human rights that we often take for granted in the Western world are still inaccessible to many women worldwide, and it evoked true awe in me to realize that somewhere, a masterclass, workshop, panel discussion, or even a statement made on stage can start an avalanche of social changes and make significant difference for girls and women that were unjustly silenced down for centuries.
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