Spanish director Olmo Couto won the ‘Juror’s Choice’ prize at the award ceremony of the film festival. He has worked with the Rojava Film Commune for five years. Serekaniye, his latest documentary, follows three women’s lives during Turkey’s 2019 invasion of the city.
The fifth Rojava International Film Festival showed 86 films across 7 days in Qamishlo, including documentaries and shorts. Around 2000 people attended the event, which was restarted after a five year pause due to security concerns during the war.
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Olmo Couto said, “this prize is more for the people of Serekaniye, for the resistance and for, principally, these two characters who are in the film - Diya Ebdela and Heval Suriya. They really gave a lot of their love for this film”. Both women attended the first screening at the
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The film festival was opened in commemoration of the Amude cinema fire in 1960 which killed over 200 children. Local sources view the fire as either a deliberate act of violence or one of extreme negligence, with doors locked from the inside and attendees double the capacity. The
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The booklet published alongside the program was titled “Guardians of Memory”, in which cinema as memory and “dreams still caught between lenses and notebooks” is discussed alongside short biographies of media and arts workers killed in the war. The use of the arts in preservation
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