Award: Best Kurdish Film Award – 6th edition of the Kobani International Film Festival 2025 “Here the Story Begins”

The film received the Best Kurdish Film Award for its poetic cinematic treatment of war trauma, memory, and loss, transforming personal grief into a deeply human visual experience through restrained storytelling and emotionally precise atmosphere.

Synopsis:

In the city of Kobani, years after ISIS attacks, an elderly tailor continues living inside his home and tailoring shop, refusing to leave while believing that his customers will someday return and life will resume as before. Alone inside the silent house, he constantly speaks to people behind a locked room, as if time itself had stopped there.

One day, he decides to prepare a special meal for those inside the room and leaves the house for the first time in years. But upon returning, he discovers that someone has entered the house and disturbed everything, forcing reality and memory to slowly collapse into one another.

Rather than portraying war directly, the film explores its lingering psychological aftermath — the invisible wounds that remain inside homes, bodies, and memory itself. The sealed walls become a metaphor for denial and unresolved grief, while sunlight becomes a final act of confrontation with truth.

Built through silence, empty spaces, and restrained visual rhythm, the film creates a contemplative cinematic experience rooted in poetic realism and human fragility.

About the Directors:

Maryam Samadi is an Iranian filmmaker and screenwriter born in 1988. She began directing films in 2009 and studied filmmaking through the Iranian Youth Cinema Society and the University of Applied Science and Technology. Her short films, including The Summer of the Swans and Salt Sellers, screened internationally and received awards in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Her work is recognized for its poetic approach to memory, identity, and human experience.

Roni Schamlian is a Kurdish actor and filmmaker born in Kobani-Aleppo in 1978 and based in Germany since 2000. He has appeared in numerous productions across Germany, Syria, and Iran, and received the Best Actor Award for The Road to Aleppo at the Hofer Filmtage Festival in Germany. In A House Near the Sun, he co-directed, co-wrote, and played the leading role, drawing from personal experiences connected to war, exile, and memory.