Culture
Rewand Jawad, an organizer of the Kurdish Film Festival in Dusseldorf, Germany, speaks to Rudaw. Photo: screengrab/Rudaw
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Unseen Images of Anfal, a Rudaw documentary on the Anfal genocide, will be screened alongside more than 30 other films at a Kurdish film festival in Dusseldorf, Germany next week.
“More than 15 documentaries and 19 short films are competing for awards, while additional films will be screened out of competition,” Rewand Jawad, one of the festival organizers, told Rudaw’s Hemin Abdullah on Friday’s Diaspora TV program.
Produced by Rudaw in 2019, Unseen Images of Anfal tells the story of a photographer who documents the atrocities of the Anfal campaign when an estimated 182,000 Kurds were killed and more than 4,500 villages were destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s. The photographer’s images accidentally fell into the hands of a stranger, who set out on a journey to identify the victims’ relatives—each photograph revealing a deeply moving narrative.
Jawad noted that most of the participating films are recent productions, created within the last few years.
In addition to the film screenings, the festival will host a literary gathering and two panel discussions. One panel will focus on Kurdish cinema, while the other will center on Rojava—the Kurdish-led autonomous region in northeast Syria—and recent attacks on Tishreen Dam.
The dam, located on the Euphrates River in northern Syria, has been the focus of a military campaign launched in November by Turkey and its allied Syrian militias with the goal of seizing control of the strategically significant dam in order to facilitate further incursions into territories held by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
“A representative from Rojava will participate as a speaker,” Jawad said.
The festival will take place from April 23 to April 27 and will be held across three cinemas in Dusseldorf.
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