Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurdish film director, producer and writer. He belongs to the "new wave" of Iranian cinema.
A Time for Drunken Horses is a 2000 Kurdish language drama film directed by Bahman Ghobadi and produced in Iran. It was a co-winner of the Caméra d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. Leonard Maltin notes that the film was "written by the director and shot in his native village, with a cast of extraordinary non-professionals."
Kurdish culture is a group of distinctive cultural traits practiced by Kurdish people. The Kurdish culture is a legacy from ancient peoples who shaped modern Kurds and their society.
Kurdish cinema focuses on the Kurdish people and culture. The fate of the Kurds as a people without a state shaped their cinema. Kurdish films often show social grievances, oppression, torture, human rights violations, and life as a stranger. Kurdish cinema has a high significance for the Kurds, as it offers the opportunity to draw attention to their own situation artistically. However, because of state repression, most films are produced in exile. The best example of this is in Turkey, where Kurds were not permitted to speak their native language until 1991, which made the development of their films more difficult.
Marooned in Iraq is a 2002 Iranian (Kurdish/Persian) film written and directed by Bahman Ghobadi and produced in Iran. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival, or FICCO for its initials in Spanish was an annual film festival founded by film producers Michel Lipkes and Paula Astorga in February 2004. The festival ran for seven years, ending in 2010 and reopened in 2014 for Narrative only Film.
Kiss the Dust is a 1991 novel by Elizabeth Laird on the conflicts between the Iraqi Kurds and Saddam Hussein's regime. It is a young adult historical fiction novel about a twelve-year-old Kurdish girl and her family's escape from Iraq over the border into Iran. The book was originally published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd. in 1991. It was first published in the US by Dutton Children's Books, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. in 1992.
Blackboards is a 2000 Iranian film directed by Samira Makhmalbaf. It focuses on a group of Kurdish refugees after the chemical bombing of Halabja by Saddam Hussein's Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War. The screenplay was co-written by Makhmalbaf with her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The dialogue is entirely in Kurdish. Makhmalbaf describes it as "something between reality and fiction. Smuggling, being homeless, and people’s efforts to survive are all part of reality... the film, as a whole, is a metaphor."
Kurds in the United States refers to people born in or residing in the United States of Kurdish origin or those considered to be ethnic Kurds.
Half Moon is a 2006 internationally co-produced Kurdish comedy-drama film directed by Bahman Ghobadi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Behnam Behzadi, partly inspired by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem. The film stars Ismail Ghaffari as Mamo, an old legendary musician, who sets to trespass the borders of Iranian Kurdistan to give one final concert in Iraqi Kurdistan with his 10 sons.
Granaz Moussavi is an Iranian-Australian contemporary poet, film director and screenwriter. She is known for her avant-garde poetry in the 1990s. Her debut feature film My Tehran for Sale (2009) is an internationally-acclaimed Australian-Iranian co-production. Her second feature film When Pomegranates Howl was nominated for the 14th Asia Pacific Screen Award as the Best Youth Feature Film and was selected as Australian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards.
Voices of Iraq is a 2004 documentary film about Iraq, created by distributing cameras to the subjects of a film, thus enabling subjects to film themselves. To preserve its innovative filmmaking, Voices of Iraq was added to the permanent collection of Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Frederick Marx is a film producer/director/writer. He was named a Chicago Tribune Artist of the Year for 1994, a 1995 Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Special Achievement Award. Frederick Marx achieved international fame for co-writing the film Hoop Dreams with Steve James, the director of the film. It is one of the highest grossing non-musical documentaries in United States history.
Rhino Season is a 2012 Iraqi-Kurdistan-Turkish docufiction film directed by Bahman Ghobadi and presented by Martin Scorsese. Starring Behrouz Vossoughi, Monica Bellucci, Yılmaz Erdoğan, Caner Cindoruk, and Arash Labaf. The movie includes poems read and written by Bayan Nassir.
The 55th annual Berlin International Film Festival was held from February 10–20, 2005. Man to Man by Régis Wargnier served as opening night film. The festival closed with Kinsey by Bill Condon.
Helen Abdulla, better known by her stage name Helly Luv, is a Kurdish singer, dancer, choreographer, actress, model, She rose to fame after uploading cover videos on social media websites like Myspace and YouTube. Helly Luv has since starred in movies, music videos and has released her own material. Gaining popularity from her 2013 single "Risk It All", Helly Luv has recently signed to G2 Music Group. In 2014, she appeared in her first theatrical feature film, Mardan.
Mehmet Aktaş is a Kurdish filmmaker, producer, author, and journalist. He is born in Turkey but lives in Germany. He is the founder and chief executive of the film production and distribution company, Mîtosfilm, in Berlin.
Hayedeh Safiyari is an Iranian film editor and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The single largest community in the United States of ethnic Kurds exists in Nashville, Tennessee. This enclave is often called "Little Kurdistan" and is located in South Nashville. The majority of Nashville's "Little Kurdistan" comes from Iraqi Kurdistan, however there are sizeable communities of Kurds from Syria, Iran, and Turkey. It has been estimated that there are 15,000 Kurds living in Nashville, although more recent estimates place the number at around 20,000, the largest in the country.
