Rojek

In 2016, Montreal-based filmmaker of Kurdish origin Zaynê Akyol delivered the striking Gulîstan, Land of Roses, in which she followed the daily lives of battalions of Kurdish women guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party fighting ISIS. Six years later, in 2022, she films the reverse angle of these revolutionary women by giving a voice to members of the Islamic State imprisoned in detention centers in Syrian Kurdistan. Rarely has a film offered such a courageous and humanistic counterpoint to an approach that touches on both political allegiances and intimate lineages. Akyol responds to the barbarity and horror of ISIS with the tools of listening. She questions her subjects with a genuine desire to understand the intrinsic motivations that led these individuals to commit acts of extreme violence and to risk everything in defense of a murderous, vengeful ideology.

What emerges from this exercise—both perilous and dangerous, with particularly grueling shooting conditions—are the outlines of geopolitical explanations, as well as an awareness of human vulnerability in the face of totalizing and seductive ideologies. While the aerial shots provide moments of breathing space between sometimes chilling testimonies, they also help establish an anxious, terrifying atmosphere in which the smoke from illegal oil refineries obscures any sense of horizon. The economic forces that underpin and sustain this hell are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, and the absence of a coordinated and sincere response from the international community raises fears of the worst, as U.S. strikes once again destabilize an already inflamed region.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director