The 6th edition of the Kobani International Film Festival in 2025 marked a new milestone in the festival’s evolving cinematic journey, not only through its international expansion and organizational growth, but also through the clearer maturation of its artistic and cinematic identity. Under the theme “Here the Story Begins”, the festival transformed into a space where cinematic voices from different cultures and experiences could meet through a human-centered visual language that transcends borders, geography, and language.
This edition witnessed broad participation from filmmakers, directors, producers, critics, and visual artists from around the world. The festival received hundreds of films from more than 120 countries, making it one of the festival’s most internationally diverse editions to date. Independent cinema and films emerging from conflict zones and marginalized human realities held a strong presence throughout the official program, reinforcing the festival’s role as a platform for free cinematic voices and emerging visual experiences.
The sixth edition also reflected significant development in film programming and evaluation processes, relying on specialized viewing and jury committees composed of filmmakers, journalists, critics, and visual artists from diverse backgrounds. This contributed to a more balanced and professional selection process open to various cinematic forms, including narrative films, documentaries, animation, and experimental cinema.
In parallel, the festival expanded its cultural and educational activities through a wide range of theoretical and practical cinema workshops covering screenwriting, directing, cinematography, editing, festival management and organization, and cinematic media. These workshops brought together filmmakers and media professionals in an effort to support young talents and strengthen cinematic culture in the region.
As part of its support for local film production and visual documentation connected to collective memory, the festival also witnessed the completion of the documentary film Kobani’s Missing People, directed by Janko Sharif and written and produced by journalist Omar Kalo. The project approached the issue of missing people in Kobani through a human-centered documentary perspective grounded in testimony, memory, and lived experience.
Throughout this edition, the Kobani International Film Festival continued to approach cinema as an act of memory, resistance, and cultural dialogue, presenting films that engaged with themes of war, exile, identity, justice, and human dignity alongside works shaped by contemporary visual experimentation and cinematic language.
On both organizational and visual levels, the sixth edition marked a noticeable expansion in the festival’s artistic identity through its visual presentations, media presence, and international communication with filmmakers and audiences, within an ongoing vision of building an independent festival with its own cinematic language and growing cultural presence.
In this edition, the slogan “Here the Story Begins” was not merely a thematic phrase, but a reflection of a cinematic path seeking new stories, voices emerging from the margins, and films that still believe in the power of the image to create a lasting human impact beyond the screen.
