Darvazeye royaha

“It feels as though my camera is filled with despair, just like me, it is filled with sadness, just like me.”

The filmmaker Negin Ahmadi takes the radical decision to accompany an all-female militia fighting in Syrian Kurdistan. Like many of the women she portrays there – for whom joining the fight against ISIS was also a way to escape social restraints – Negin tries to discover what makes life worth living. Negin’s filming process matures into a self-exploring diary. Her recordings alternate between the brutality of combat and intimate moments between the women soldiers, combing each other’s hair or exposing their wounded bodies. A storytelling that subverts the grand narratives of war. A composition of personal experiences weaved into political images, Darvazeye royaha asks questions about the role of women in battle and the power of cinematic images to illuminate social issues.