The best intentions can fall prey to world events.
The 11th Duhok International Film Festival, a celebration of the works of Kurdish filmmakers, was meant to make people think beyond the history of the Kurds’ existential battles – against Saddam, against ISIS and intermittently against their northern neighbour Turkey.
“Being one of the most highlighted cultural events in the Middle East and the biggest Kurdish Film Festival in the world, The Duhok IFF aims to return the cultural identity to the Kurdistan region, so it once again is perceived as a place of development instead of an area of political conflict,” artistic director Shawkat Amin Korki wrote in his letter of invitation.
But just prior to the festival’s Dec. 9 opening, the city of Aleppo – 500 kms away – fell to Syrian rebels, en route to the eventual fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Whatever happens there will be part of Kurdish history yet to be written. In a sit-down interview, Korki said the news caused some invited guests to cancel their plans at the last minute.
But the FIPRESCI trio of jurors was there, despite one being told she could not be insured to visit an area the insurance provider considered “unsafe.”
They were there opening night, when Duhok Governor Ali Tatar welcomed them to “Duhok, the city of co-existence.” And indeed, Duhok does seem to have a history of avoiding direct conflict. Even the advance of ISIS a decade ago stopped at Mosul, not far to the South.
Those who attended were rewarded with VIP treatment (jurors were introduced on the red carpet), and day trips to holy sites and locations dating back to Biblical times and even mentioned in the Old Testament.
As for moving the needle forward in terms of being recognized for Kurdish culture rather than for struggle, some of the nominated filmmakers didn’t get the memo. The movies included the deeply moving When the Walnut Leaves Turn Yellow by Mehmet Ali Konar, about a terminally ill village chief trying to keep the peace in the ‘90s as relations deteriorate with increasingly belligerent Turkish troops.
A war aftermath-film, Sakar, by Ebrahim Saeedi, is about a boy in a small village, whose mother has recently died from the latent effects of chemical attacks from the conflict with Saddam. When he and his best friend find a years-old half-buried bomb, he treats it as a toy and begins constructing cardboard soldiers around it, for reasons buried in his troubled mind.
Even films made by Kurdish diaspora filmmakers, tended to look back in anger. The Virgin and Child, by Binevsa Berivan, is set in Belgium, where a Kurdish-speaking Yazidi woman shows up pregnant, seeking legal recourse against a Belgian national and ISIS fighter who enslaved and raped her family.
And the relatively light-hearted Winners by Soleen Yusef, a German-set film replete with sports movie and high-school “mean girl” tropes, has its underdog refugee soccer star wrestle with her homesickness over Syria and an aunt she lost to the civil war.
There were a few who found explored different subjects, including Moshfegh Shojaei, who followed, however unsurely, in the surrealistic steps of the David Lynches and Leos Coraxes of the world with his Migration, the metaphorical story of a man lost in a desert and then confined to a cave, while finding himself faced with his life’s transgressions.
And Scenarist, by Sami Sabah – curiously, the only movie on the FIPRESCI schedule in a modern urban setting – was a simple story of a wannabe film director who finds love while trying to find an investor for his film idea.
Eventually, the FIPRESCI jurors settled on A Happy Day, a film only tangentially related to events in the Kurdistan region. Set in Norway, it is the reality-based story of illegal immigrant children and teenagers who are kept in a boarding school until they turn 18 – at which time they are sent home to their countries of birth, regardless of circumstance. The director is Hisham Zaman and indeed, one of the young key characters is Kurdish.
Within that tragic context, relationships are tested, young love is introduced, and there is a comic edge, in a well-constructed and smart script.
Life goes on in a region that seems constantly tested. And as its filmmaking evolves, we’ll undoubtedly see that life portrayed on a more intimate scale.
Jim Slotek
© FIPRESCI 2024