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Afghan filmmaker Roya Sadat is readying “The Forgotten History,” her next feature after the acclaimed “A Letter to the President” (2017). Sadat is one of the few women filmmakers from Afghanistan and taught herself cinema during the Taliban regime.

“The Forgotten History,” set in pre-civil war Afghanistan, sees the friendship of two girls disrupted by their opposing ideals. Through the years, they discover that friendship is stronger than any political ideal.

Sadat aims to go beyond the cliched Afghanistan narrative with the film. “I felt that the world needs to hear a new and unspoken story of our land with a look that reminds us, and the world, again of love and sacrifice,” Sadat tells Variety. “I felt that this story which takes place in the 1970s has a lot to say about a country where once there were guns and wars.”

“The story that has always been told about Afghan...

Ersin ÇELIK is a writer, journalist and filmmaker. In 2006, he graduated from the Physical Sciences Teaching Department of the Samsun Omu. He then started working as a journalist, which often led to arrests and prosecution. Much of his work as a writer and filmmaker focuses on conflict areas such as Rojava and Kurdistan. The End Will Be Spectacular is his feature film debut; it premiered at the 2019 Kolkata International Film Festival.

On the occasion of his debut screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam, we speak with him about Kurds, Isis and Erdogan, Ocalan, shooting near war zones, the Rojava Film Commune, and many other topics, in a rather political interview that definitely deserves a watch.

What is the situation with the Kurds, Isis and Erdogan’s Turkey at the moment? What about Pkk? What are the central demands of Kurds and how close to accomplishing them they are at the moment?...

Amassing enough military equipment and weaponry to make a modern war film is no easy – or inexpensive – feat, especially if you’re working under a tight budget. But it always helps if a retreating army just so happens to have left the necessary guns, tanks and uniforms lying around.

That’s the tactic the filmmakers of the Rojava Film Commune, based in the autonomous Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, deployed in making The End Will Be Spectacular, showing at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where the group also gave the annual Freedom Lecture on Sunday night.

The bloody and ...

Amassing enough military equipment and weaponry to make a modern war film is no easy – or inexpensive – feat, especially if you’re working under a tight budget. But it always helps if a retreating army just so happens to have left the necessary guns, tanks and uniforms lying around.

That’s the tactic the filmmakers of the Rojava Film Commune, based in the autonomous Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, deployed in making The End Will Be Spectacular, showing at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where the group also gave the annual Freedom Lecture on Sunday night.

The bloody and ...

The Kurds have been under intense persecution from the Turks for decades, but during the latest years, the situation worsened significantly, particularly because, apart from the Turkish army and police, the Kurds also had to face Isis. Between 2012 and 2019, the Kurds set up a ‘stateless democracy’ in Rojava, northern Syria, based on local self-governance, gender equality and a communal economy. The Rojava Film Commune was established in 2015, in the middle of the Syrian civil war, to make films based on that region’s reality. The present film is a result of the Commune and its main part was shot in Kobane, in the borders of Turkey, where, at the time, there was a great battle against Isis in Raqqa City and the Turkish army began to bomb Afrin.

The film tells the real story of the resistance of a group of 60 young people who attempted to break the Turkish siege...