13 features premiere at London Kurdish Film Festival

The seventh London Kurdish Film Festival wrapped up yesterday at the Picturehouse Hackney and Westbourne Studios in London.

This year’s program included 18 feature films, 30 documentaries and 55 short films, 20 of which will be competing in the third Yılmaz Güney Short Film Competition.

Picturehouse Hackney hosted all screenings between Nov. 17 and yesterday, while there were also activities at Westbourne Studios in west London during the final three days of the event.

This year’s festival includes 18 features films, 16 of which were made by directors of Kurdish origin. Thirteen of the feature films premiered in the United Kingdom at the festival.

Kurdish director Hiner Saleem participated in the festival and said Kurds in Turkey had started printing newspapers, first weekly and later daily, to confront the state-controlled disinformation campaign about events taking place.

The festival has been running since 2001.

This year the festival also hosted five feature films from northern Iraq that were all supported by different cinema branches in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Entries from the KRG included “Kick Off” by Shawkat Amin Korki, “Mandoo” by Ebrahim Saeedi, “The Night of Judgment” by Hussain Sewdin, “Qandil Mountains” by Taha Karimi and “The Quarter of Scarecrows” by Hassan Ali.

Young Kurdish director Shiar Abdi’s first feature film, “Meş” (Walking), hit the headlines in Turkey when it was shown at Antalya’s International Golden Orange Film Festival.

The documentary program included 30 films covering a range of issues. Films reached the festival from all over the region’s Kurdish areas, as well as from the rest of the world. Some of the highlights in the documentary program included “The First Movie” by Irish director Mark Cousins, and Ebrahim Saaedi and Zahavi Sanjavi’s award-winning documentary, “All My Mothers.”