The Duhok International Film Festival held its 10th edition from December 9 to 16 in Duhok, a city nestled in the hills of the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
The official theme of the festival this year was “mother tongue”. The nurturing of culture in the Kurdish language is of heartfelt importance in a place with a fraught history of resisting genocidal attempts to stamp out Kurdish identity by rulers in Baghdad and Turkey and incursions by ISIS. It is a relaxed, warmly convivial festival that places a high value on openness of cultural exchange (France was this year’s focus country, with Claire Simon’s Our Body among the films screened.)
Keen to dispel the stigma arising from war-dominated media reports and misconceptions that the region is too dangerous to visit, the festival team and the city as a whole welcome foreign industry guests with open arms. Everybody seemed eager to talk to everybody, fuelled by long buffet meals and that rare kind of atmosphere found only in festivals that have not been overly corporatised. Duhok’s local audience was hungry for cinema, and its auditoriums attracted good numbers at the daily screenings.
A buoyant mood and a packed cinema hall marked the festival’s opening night. The ceremony was followed by a screening of Kurdish, Belgium-based director Sahim Omar Kalifa’s tale of resilience Baghdad Messi, about a young Iraqi (played by Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah, in attendance) who dreams of being a star footballer and loses a leg when his village is attacked by terrorists. Clips recapped the past years of the festival, its growth and challenges, which included footage of the ISIS takeover of swathes of territory after it crossed over from Syria in 2014, forcing the festival to skip a year.
Along with the enjoyment that typifies any festival, it was impossible to forget that these are people who have been through a lot. This was reflected in a politically astute programme with a clear, humanistic handwriting, addressing the years of Saddam Hussein and themes of war, displacement, exile and resistance. A controversial, much-discussed screening of Hiding Saddam Hussein, directed by Halkawt Mustafa, was attended by Iraq’s Foreign Minister, Fuad Hussein. The film allows the Iraqi farmer who hid Saddam Hussein (the deposed dictator with a track record of chemical weapon use against the Kurdish people) to describe this experience from his own perspective. Terrestrial Verses, directed by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami, the former of whom was under a travel ban from Iran’s regime at the time, was another popular screening. Its satirical vignettes show the power abuses and limitations operating in all spheres of Tehran’s public life, and the indomitable spirit of citizens entrapped in these Kafkaesque situations.
A real revelation — deservedly netting the Best Documentary award — was The Sky Is Mine by Kurdish-Iranian director Ayoub Naseri, who is based in Milan. He filmed the life in exile, in an Italian abbey, of artist Aziz and his disabled son Erfan, who fled Afghanistan when the country fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Small on budget and running time but huge of heart, it is a personal work of quiet poetic moments, infused with an empathy so palpable it moved many in the Duhok audience to tears. Between Revolutions by Romanian director Vlad Petri, a sensitively constructed and speculative work of archive and memory, also went over well with viewers, and came away with the Best Feature Film award from a jury headed by Turkish director Emin Alper. It turns on a letter exchange between two women — one Iranian, and the other Romanian — who met as students in communist-era Bucharest before dissent spilled into the streets and regimes were toppled.
In the Kurdish Shorts competition (one of two shorts programmes for which this writer had the honour of heading the jury), the award went to Ramazan Kilic’s Things Unheard Of, in which a girl imaginatively compensates for the loss of her grandmother’s television, as Turkey’s military crack down on Kurdish channels. A special mention went to Triangle, through which the director Zhino Hadi Hasan boldly calls out the harassment of women in public spaces. The line-up signaled much raw talent and a willingness to tackle hard political subjects head-on in a Kurdish industry determined to overcome the myriad obstacles it faces.
