Films by Guevara Namer

Germany 2021, 92 min
by Antonia Kilian

In order to avoid a forced marriage, 19-year-old Hala finds shelter across the Euphrates, at the Kurdish Female Military. While learning how to fight, she gets inspired by the promise of freeing more women. When the Kurdish military liberates her hometown from ISIS, she returns there as a policewoman authorised to protect other vulnerable women. Hala finds herself ready to fulfil her greatest dream: to free her younger sisters from her father's hand.Τhe threat of a marriage and the brutal stories of female oppression lead women to the other side of the river. They are trained in a strict military style, taught that men are the enemy. But is there freedom to be found between holding a gun against the patriarchic society or be deprived of the possibility to love?

2021, 183 min
by Diana El Jeiroudi

They grew up in the lands of dictators and surveillance, where images are censored, photos are burned, thoughts are discreet, and mouths are kept shut. During the years, they made films, documented life, their lives, at least what was possible. They recorded sounds at night and in secret, for the senses to complete the image. From what are seemingly scattered images and narratives, a coherent emotive sensibility emerges unpacking a singular perspective of history and an attempt to speak what has been unspoken and silenced. A first person narrative which pendulates between a perspective that is timelessly personal and intimate, and another which is, on the contrary, very vast, contemporary and political. It traces the journeys of a filmmaker and her partner, friends and their families, once as revolutionaries in their country, once as exiles in Europe nowadays, once as activists, as filmmakers, as lovers, and as listeners. A contemplative journey from silence into words, from blindness into seeing, and of how cinema made it possible and saved their lives. [LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA]