AFKK Shorts – openingsavond

Amsterdam Koerdisch Film Festival

A collection of the Kurdish shorts shown at the opening night

The dream (Gulê Welat, 2023), 12 min.

An old mother from Kobane grieves for the death of her young son, who was martyred in one of the battles against ISIS. She finds peace in her dreams every night, where she gets the chance to share her life and daily thoughts with her son.

The land of buried women (Rekawt Hama Tofiq, 2023), 16 min.

Mam Ali, an elderly man, has been working in the graveyard for more than 13 years. He has dedicated his entire life to the women who are murdered in honor killings. His concerns about the oppression of Kurdish women are expressed in the way he cares for their graves.

Things unheard of (Ramazan Kılıç, 2023), 16 min.

After the Kurdish satellite is taken away, 10 year old Şevîn wants to put a smile back on her bedridden and mute grandmother’s face. She does not understand Turkish and the television was the only way for her to see something of the world. Şevîn has a heartwarming plan to make her grandmother happy again.

Suitcase (Saman Hosseinpuor and Ako Zandkarimi, 2023), 15 min.

Far from his own homeland, a Kurdish refugee lives in his suitcase. In it he carries memories of his family. When someone steals the suitcase in the tumult of the foreign city center, he loses his home a second time.

Star on the border (Bêrîvan Saruhan, 2023), 19 min.

In March 1993, the then Gendarmerie Unit Commander Hasan Atilla Uğur and a group of soldiers under his command raided a house in the residential area called “Dirbesiyê” at the zero point of the Syria/Rojava border, which was then a town in Mardin-Kızıltepe and is now a neighborhood, and removed the star symbol on the railings of its windows. He orders them to dismantle it. The documentary follows the people that have experienced this incident and their memories of living in Dirbesiyêm located on the Syrian/Rojava border, where until today, there is still a Turkey-Rojava conflict going on.