In the previous section, I recounted how, after navigating the areas controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria and crossing the Euphrates River, our guide’s voice came through the open microphone of his phone saying, “Hûn bi xêr hatin Kurdistanê” (“Welcome to Kurdistan”), a moment that lifted the weight of the dark clouds over us and gave us the feeling of having finally reached free land.
What, then, does it mean for a piece of land to become free? Recent history has taught us enough to know how slippery that word is. Throughout the Syrian war, even armed mercenary factions declared areas they seized as “liberated” in their media. But what does liberation truly look like?
Human history is filled with attempts to create spaces of autonomous existence. As Ibn Khaldun noted, countless forms of asabiyyah emerged over time; Bedouin groups rose from them, later settled, and out of these transformations came distinctive civilizations. Each grounded itself in a particular form of rule, families, clans, tribes, dynasties, city-states, principalities, kingdoms, empires, monarchies, tyrannies, democracies. Every system produced its own mythology, and those mythologies generated their own epics, stories, ideologies. Belief systems blossomed in a thousand colors. Religions and theologies formed. And all of these structures, whatever name they carried, served one essential purpose: maintaining control over territory. But possessing land and liberating land are fundamentally different things. Still, every conquest has historically been justified through a narrative of liberation, sometimes called salvation, sometimes independence, sometimes revolution. Ownership, in every era, meant the same thing: the power to rule over a place and the life lived upon it. So, what sets Rojava apart? Is there something that distinguishes it from older models of civilization, from traditions of domination, from struggles framed as liberation or independence? If such a difference exists, what reveals it? Rather than offering a theoretical or political answer, I will try to make sense of it through the impressions gathered over the few days I spent on this land.
Disappointment at the checkpoint
The sêytarês (local checkpoints) on the Rojava side look almost identical to those run by HTS. There is the same “entry tunnel” you might expect at the edge of a city, the same two or four members of the Internal Security Forces with light weapons directing traffic from both sides, the same speed bumps forcing every vehicle to slow down, the same ritual gestures from drivers who have no other purpose than to pass through safely. Up to this point, the resemblance is striking. But the expressions on the officers’ faces could not be more different. On the HTS side, they greet each approaching car with visible nervousness, suspicion tightening every movement. On the Rojava side, members of the Internal Security Forces carry themselves with a calm seriousness, a sense of duty accompanied by an easy, confident smile. Their uniforms tell another story: in HTS territory, black dominates; in areas held by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), they wear camouflage or olive-green military clothing. Then comes one of those moments you never expect to encounter yourself. Around 50 kilometers before reaching Hasakah (Hesekê), we are stopped for a passport check. We hand over our passports, assuming the usual routine: a quick look, a brief wait, and a polite “you may go.” Instead, after a short delay, they ask us to pull over, step out of the vehicle and follow the Internal Security Forces officers to the checkpoint office.
Inside, not a single person speaks Kurdish. It is a disappointment. We thought we had arrived in Kurdistan, yet none of them knows Kurdish. Still, they are polite, they offer us chairs, bring water and try to help despite the language barrier. A few attempts at conversation fall flat. Eventually, an officer steps out from the back and greets us in Kurdish. This is unexpected; he speaks exactly like someone from our own village. He cannot possibly be related to us, yet the familiarity is striking. He asks where we have come from and how we passed through the earlier checkpoints, his curiosity genuine and slightly puzzled. I can sense that our uneventful journey surprises him. After a phone call, he realizes we are guests of the festival, and his demeanor warms instantly. Soon there is joking, talk about cinema and a comfortable rapport forming. But darkness is closing in, and we still have nearly two hours of road ahead.
“Mala Şîn…”
As we enter Qamishlo, our driver follows a navigation app toward what is clearly a pre-marked address. The city’s main arteries, its boulevards, streets and side roads, are draped with festival posters. Every intersection carries the name of someone who fought and died for this land. Some junctions, set where four roads meet, are symbolically tied to pivotal moments in history. Statues evoking freedom, sacrifice and resistance stand at their centers. Passing beneath the images and names of those who resisted occupation, plunder, aggression and colonialism, we turn into a narrow side street.
On the wall beside the entrance of a building, the words “Mala Şîn” are written, an expression that, in Turkish, could mean either “House of Mourning” or “Blue House.” Both are possible, because in Kurdish şîn means both “mourning” and “blue”. The etymology is striking: a single syllable that signifies grief as a ritual, color as a symbol, and even borrows meaning from green (green) in certain contexts. In spring, when the land turns green, one does not say kesk or keskahî; instead, people say şînahî (“greening”), using expressions like şînahî derket (“the greening emerged”) or erd şîn bû (“the earth revived”). Here, şîn is not merely a color; it gestures toward animation, rebirth, the renewal of existence. And so the word Kurdish people use to describe meeting death with dignity, şîn as mourning, is the very same word they use to describe the world coming alive again. Mourning and renewal share the same breath.
Spanish, Italian and French speakers who speak Kurdish
Mala Şîn is the place where festival guests are welcomed and served meals. Its door opens into a wide courtyard, filled with wall decorations in every color, handwoven kilims, posters, and cushions and seating arrangements that reflect different elements of Kurdish culture. The soundscape is just as vibrant: most people are speaking Kurdish, but words in German, Arabic, English, Spanish and several other languages float through the air. What is even more striking is discovering that some of the people speaking Kurdish more fluently and elegantly than Kurds from Diyarbakır (Amed) or Erzurum are, in fact, Italians, British, or Armenians. How had this happened? We Kurds often grow up not knowing Turkish when we start school, only to forget much of our Kurdish by the time we finish high school. So, watching these English, French, Spanish or Azerbaijani young people speak Kurdish more gracefully and more affectionately, than many of us piques my curiosity. I soon learn that many of them are revolutionaries who came during the resistance of Kobanê and fought against ISIS within international brigades. When their military responsibilities diminished, many chose not to return to their home countries. Instead, they took part in building the communal-democratic system in Rojava. Some were already filmmakers and joined the Rojava cinema commune, beginning to produce work there, several of their films have even been selected for the festival.
Azad from Upper Azerbaijan
Not all of them are directors. One of the filmmakers who approached us speaking Kurdish, introducing himself as Azad, turned out to be an Azerbaijani from Upper Azerbaijan. This surprised me more than speaking Kurdish with a French or German guest. I had previously worked on a film project in Iranian Azerbaijan, and the Turks and Azerbaijanis I met there were, compared to Azerbaijanis from the Republic of Azerbaijan, noticeably more open on the Kurdish question. Perhaps this came from living side by side with Kurds for centuries in places like Urmia, Khoy and Mahabad in Eastern Kurdistan (Rojhilat), sharing a common cultural and historical sensibility. But encountering someone from Northern Azerbaijan, a region where Turkic nationalism is almost taught as catechism, who had come to fight on the same front as the Kurds, who had actively taken part in the social reconstruction of Rojava, who worked alongside Kurds in one of the youngest and most creative movements of Kurdish cinema, and who chose not to seek visibility as a director but instead labored behind the camera, offering intellectual and artistic effort… this was something else entirely. He was, in many ways, “more Kurdish” than you or me, more rooted in the life, culture and collective rhythm of that place than many who were born into it.
*
And so our first day in Rojava begins in the evening. Without seeing anything in daylight, we are taken, along with all the other guests, to the hotels where we will be staying. Starting tomorrow morning, we will walk across land won inch by inch against some of the fiercest, most annihilating violence history has ever witnessed, territory torn from the grip of rage and blind brutality, reclaimed and made free through unimaginable resistance. We will watch the cinema created in this region, inside halls rebuilt in the aftermath of devastation, and we will spend our days discussing the intellect, philosophy and aesthetics of film here: the sounds, the echoes, the light, the color, the ideas that emerge from this geography.