Zagros Film Festival opens its virtual doors 1 – 31 March in its inaugural year as the first online Kurdish film festival.
With the festival, featuring 15 free Kurdish films with English subtitles, the organisers intend to encourage international recognition of Kurdish culture, transcend borders, geographies and languages, and showcase the power of cinema.
Kobanê (2022) portrays the determination, hope and resilience of the Kurdish movement in love and war. The film, derived from first-hand accounts, follows a female Kurdish fighter, outnumbered and outgunned, in the harrowing but successful defence against Islamic State (ISIS) during the siege of Kobanê in northern Syria in 2014.
The carefully crafted documentary-style film was directed by Özlem Yaşar and co-produced by the Rojava Film Commune and the Mesopotamian Democratic Movement for Culture and Art (TEV-ÇAND) in Kurdish-led North and East Syria.
A documentary film, Exil (‘Exile’) (2021), produced by Şerif Çiçek, Onur Güler and Adil Demirci, addresses the long history of repression faced by Kurdish politicians in Turkey, including the removal of parliamentary immunity and the appointment of unelected government trustees in Kurdish-majority provinces.
Navnîşan (‘The Address’) (2022), an award-winning short written and directed by Aram Dildar, tells the story of a teacher returning to his home village in southeast Turkey to find it wiped off the map, symbolising the lost voice of Kurdish identity and history under systemic oppression.
The film festival is named after Kurdistan’s Zagros mountain range, which spreads from Iran, through northern Iraq to southeast Turkey, and are at the heart of the Kurdish identity. “These films originate from various regions of Kurdistan [Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran] and are filmed in different dialects of Kurdish,” said festival coordinator Simon Suleymani.
The festival website includes a portal for donations for the filmmakers.
