Photo caption shows: Hussein Hassan, director of “The Dark Wind”

“The Dark Wind” by Hussein Hassan of Iraqi/Kurdistan
UNESCO sponsored Cultural Diversity Award, at the Asia Pacific Screen Award is a special place in the list, because the heart and soul and ambition of APSA is to give a platform for, and reward films that express and explain to us, unique cultures of our vast region, so much of which is unknown to wider cinema audiences. This story is about the Yazidi people, who number about half a million, a unique group within the Kurdish people.
The story of the film is desperately sad. A young and very much in love couple, Reko and Pero, have just become engaged. Their remote village is one day horrified to see ISIS riding towards them in their fleet of Toyota trucks, black clad, waving guns and their ominous flag. ISIS considers this group who practice a religion called Yazdanism, to be Infidels. The people flee, some die, most end up in a UN refugee camp, but all the young women are kidnapped, to be sold as slaves. The most beautiful girl of all is Pero. When it becomes possible for him, Reko gets leave from his fighting unit, and goes in search of his beloved. He finds her in the care of Kurdish soldier women… She has been used and abused and sold back to them, but she is shell-shocked, eyes vacant, and no-one needs to tell us the horror she has endured.
The village people, including her family receive her with fear and Reko’s family want him to forget her, now that she is no longer a virgin, and because of her state of trauma. Her own father is wary too, and only her mother and her fiancée Reko, stand beside her and support her. Slowly she recovers somewhat, able to speak again and walk about. But there are always the stares of suspicion, condemnation from the community. There is more, but I will not go on to tell you what happens.
The film is shot on real locations in the desert, and in a UN refugee camp, and is chillingly realistic. Two hours with these Yazidi people, and we have a far more compassionate idea of what it’s like to be victims of ISIS. As if Kurds did not already have enough of a problem, being without a land of their own, but scattered across the corners where Turkey, Syria, Iraq borders meet, and oppressed by their ‘hosts’ who have the land that should be Kurdistan.
Text by Cynthia Webb
Copyright December 2016
Photo of Hussein Hassan, by Cynthia Webb
Copyright December 2016