Soura x IQMF

Dir. Diako Yazdani
Documentary
2019 | 88 minutes | France, Iraq | Arabic,Kurdish | English subtitles

Kojin is a young Kurdish gay man who, at the director’s request, decides to confront his community about the subject of homosexuality. For that, he travels back home with director Diako Yazdani, an Iranian-Kurdish political refugee in France. What starts as a self discovery journey quickly turns into an exploration of the fear of the other, and both director Yazdani and protagonist Kojin, become the subject of this exceptional documentary. Together, they embark on a mission to explore themes of religion and gay conversion therapy and face their families, friends, and other members of the Kurdish community with their rooted prejudices. By drawing a portrait of a society where homosexuality seems not to exist, Yazdani’s debut crafts a story of courage and persistence, and about striving to live in harmony with one’s own nature, regardless of its consequences.

Dir. Nicolas Khoury
2021 | 70 min | Lebanon, Netherlands | Arabic | English subtitles 

Welcome to the complicated, dysfunctional, yet loving family dynamics between a single mother and her two adult children in Lebanon. The film’s narrator and director is Nicolas Khoury, who, through 15 years of home movies, investigates the loneliness that overcame the family when the father passed away. Now, his sister is married and has moved away from home and Nicolas is left alone with his mother and her expectations for ‘the correct life’, which he cannot fulfil. He is questioning his own sexuality, and he does not fit into the boxes that Lebanese society offers him. His mother fears that he will be a failure. The refreshing thing about his cinematic rebellion is the candid humour and the deep love that we clearly sense between all the family members. Nicolas’s loneliness is shared by both his mother and his sister, and it might ironically be the thing that binds them all together.