ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Memories On Stone, a social drama directed by the Kurdish filmmaker Shawkat Amin, took the Best Film Award at the prestigious Abu Dhabi Film Festival on Friday. The film is about two childhood friends on a mission to produce a film about the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds. It won the Black Pearl Award for Best Film from the Arab World, seen as an important signal of recognition. “Through the trials and tribulations of his protagonists, which he treats with a subtle humour, Shawkat gives us a poignant glimpse of contemporary Kurdish society as well as its past in this film, which may have been inspired by his personal experiences as a filmmaker,” Raman Chawla of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, said about the film. In the film set after the fall of Saddam Hussein, boyhood friends Hussein (played by Hussein Hasan) and Alan (played by Nazmi Kirki) decide to make a film about the Kurdish genocide of the 1980s. But producing a movie in postwar Kurdistan turns out to be difficult as the two would-be filmmakers struggle to find a lead actress to star in their picture. Sinor (played by Shima Molaei), arrives for the audition, and she is beautiful and passionate about the project. But the joy of finding the perfect actress is short-lived as Sinor seems to need the permission of male guardians to star in the film. Memories on the Stone offers an insight into the challenges of making films in Kurdistan Region. "It really was difficult to make this movie," says Shawkat Amin. “It's about cinema but also about the tragedy of the Kurdish people; that's why I'm happy to get this award.” The Anfal Campaign was launched by the Iraqi government in the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war. The campaign takes its name from Surat al-Anfal in the Quran that was used as a code name for a series of systematic attacks against the Kurdish population between 1986 and 1989 According to Human Rights Watch, the Iraqi government systematically killed 50,000 to 100,000 civilians including women and children. Kurdish and Iraqi officials put the death toll at 180,000. Faced with overwhelming challenges in his past attempts to make movies, Shawkat tried in his new picture to reflect on his own experiences. “My first film, Crossing the Dust, was about the past, but the narrative unfolded in the present. Memories on Stone tries, in a way, to show how my first film was made,” Shawkat told a discussion panel at the festival. Though filmmaking is still an unprofitable business in Kurdistan, new and prolific directors have emerged in the last decade, including award winning Bahman Ghobadi, Huner Saleem and Jano Rojbayani who have tried to deal with the social and political realities of Iraqi Kurdistan in different ways.
.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
