All the Mountains Give: Kurdish Cinema, Borders, and the Weight of Survival
In Kurdish history and culture, borders are never neutral. Enclosing a homeland that is politically fragmented and geographically divided, borders have long functioned as sites of anxiety, survival, and endurance. For a people whose identity has been shaped by displacement and statelessness, the border is not merely a line on a map but a lived condition that structures everyday life, labor, and imagination. This persistent lack of sovereignty has made borders a central preoccupation in Kurdish cinema. As one of my classmates in the UK once remarked, “Kurds don’t respect borders because they don’t have one.” Kurdish filmmakers, therefore, repeatedly return to border spaces not simply as settings, but as sites of struggle, endurance, and collective memory, portraying them as existential landscapes that define and constrain Kurdish life.
Arash Rakhsha’s All the Mountains Give emerges firmly within this cinematic tradition while extending it in compelling ways. Filmed over six years, the documentary offers a powerful and intimate account of the covert kolbari goods trade operating between Kurdish towns in Iran and the borderlands of Iraq. It follows two border smugglers, Hamid and Yasser, as they traverse life-threatening terrain to sustain their families. Rather than framing their labor through spectacle or political exposition, Rakhsha adopts a sustained observational approach that immerses viewers in the rhythms of daily life under conditions of systemic precarity. The constant presence of danger is tempered by moments of domestic intimacy, revealing how the harsh realities of labor are inseparable from the softer, enduring bonds of family.
For many viewers, particularly those encountering the film at the 12th Duhok International Film Festival, where it received the FIPRESCI Award, All the Mountains Give inevitably recalls Bahman Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses (Camera d’Or, Cannes 2000). Like Ghobadi, Rakhsha predominantly employs blue-dominant, low-saturation, near-monochromatic imagery and diffuse natural lighting to craft a visually restrained environment marked by climatic austerity and affective reserve. This visual strategy reflects a broader tendency in Kurdish cinema to portray borderlands as suspended zones of endurance, shaped by environmental severity, political neglect, and historical precarity.
Yet Rakhsha distinguishes his work through meticulous attention to spatial complexity. The documentary exposes four distinct routes through which the kolbari trade operates. The most common involves traveling on foot across snow-covered mountains rising to 3,600 meters, carrying loads of roughly forty kilograms for journeys lasting up to nine hours, with payment calculated by the kilogram. Other routes employ boats to cross rivers, swimming through freezing waters with heavy cargo, or using mules to navigate narrow, hazardous mountain paths, which are more easily detected by border patrols. In one harrowing scene, a mule falls and breaks its leg, only to be put down with a mercy shot, starkly illustrating the precarity and violence embedded in these survival strategies.
Rakhsha’s engagement with these routes is inseparable from his biography. In interviews, he has described how the film reflects his own youth, when he smuggled cigarettes and fabric across borders. After years living abroad, he returned to his homeland to produce his debut feature, taking on the roles of director, editor, screenwriter, and cinematographer over a six-year period. In this sense, All the Mountains Give aligns closely with what Hamid Naficy describes as “accented cinema”: films shaped by personal experience in relation to collective conditions. The “self” on screen is never purely individual; it stands for shared circumstances of labor, survival, and endurance.
This autobiographical dimension is deeply entangled with the film’s aesthetic and affective strategies. Drawing on lived experience, Rakhsha mobilizes immersive landscapes and haptic imagery to produce an experiential realism. The images are not representations that stand in for reality; they are lived experience. Meaning emerges through duration, proximity, and embodied perception rather than through explanatory narration. In Laura Marks’s terms, the film cultivates a haptic visuality, privileging texture, closeness, and intimacy over symbolic clarity. Borders, in this reading, are not explained; they are felt.
A scene that crystallizes this embodied politics occurs when Hamid has his arm tattooed with the Kurdish proverb, “No friend but the mountains.” This widely circulated aphorism encodes collective historical memory, inscribed directly onto the vulnerable surface of the body. Landscape, history, and survival converge in the tattoo, reaffirming the mountains not as romantic symbols but as enduring witnesses to Kurdish resilience and precarity.
The film also foregrounds the profound human cost of border survival. The mountains exact a heavy toll, as articulated by Hamid at the film’s close. In despair over abandoning his dream of migrating to Germany, he states plainly, “Kolbari took everything from me.” His words resonate beyond the individual, reflecting the collective hardship of a people whose lives are defined by the intersecting pressures of geography, politics, and necessity. The mountains, in this sense, give little and take much—a stark reversal of conventional cinematic lyricism.
Through this careful integration of narrative, form, and biography, All the Mountains Give situates intimate human stories within the broader aesthetic and political traditions of Kurdish border cinema. The documentary exemplifies cinema’s capacity to produce an embodied encounter with lived experience, challenging the notion of film images as mere representation. Memory, labor and geography are rendered sensorially, inviting audiences to inhabit rather than simply observe. Rakhsha’s work reminds us that borders are not only crossed; they are lived, endured, and inscribed on the body and Kurdish cinema remains uniquely positioned to render this precarious existence visible.
By transforming the lived experience of labor and survival into a haptic, immersive cinematic language, All the Mountains Give offers not only a window into Kurdish life but also a model for how documentary can enact the lived, affective reality of marginalized communities. In doing so, it reinforces a core truth of Kurdish cinema: that the border is never merely a line, but a site of existential negotiation, collective memory, and enduring human endurance.
Kovan Hussein Saado
© FIPRESCI 2025