Rêger Azad Kaya’s film Gava Şitil Mezin Dibin (Where the Seedlings Grow) about a family returning to the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane (Kobanê) won the Best Fiction Feature award at the Montecine Montevideo World Film Festival 2023 in Uruguay.
The 83-minute-long feature film was produced by the Rojava Film Commune, a group of artists working in Kurdish-held northern Syria, with Kaya at the director’s seat and Deniz Derya and Mihemed Emin Engizek sharing the scriptwriting. Filming took place in Kobane in the summer of 2019.
In the film, a yoghurt seller from the famous town and his two children run into Hemûd, a boy who is looking for his home. The day they spend together ends up full of both adventure and misfortune, and showcases the changing dynamics in the region after the revolution, when Kurdish-led forces pushed the fundamentalist Islamic State (ISIS) out.
“The film tries to show in one day of the revolution that as the new social construction grows like a tree with the revolution, the most effective dynamic that will strengthen that structure is the children,” the commune said.