Award: Best Kurdish Film – 5th edition of the Kobani International Film Festival 2024 (Taha Karimi Edition)

Film Synopsis:

The film begins with a long and silent wait inside an isolated Kurdish village, where an elderly mother lives with the hope of her son’s return from military service. But as time passes and no trace of him appears, waiting slowly transforms into a painful search that leads her toward a truth she was never prepared to confront.

Built through silence, emotional restraint, and cold physical distance, the film transforms exhausted faces and empty spaces into reflections of grief, anxiety, and emotional loss. Through a deeply human cinematic approach, the work explores questions of identity, fear, and the fragile relationship between motherhood and society within a social environment shaped by silence and judgment.

Its visual language relies on quiet emotional tension and restrained atmosphere, where waiting itself becomes a dramatic act, and the external journey gradually turns into an internal confrontation with memory, truth, and loss.

About the Director:

Saman Hosseinpuor is a Kurdish filmmaker and screenwriter born in Kurdistan–Iran in 1993. His cinematic work belongs to a human-centered form of cinema that explores identity, memory, marginalization, and emotional fragility through a visual language balancing realism and poetic sensitivity.

He holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Cinema and participated in internationally recognized film programs, including:

• Berlinale Talents 2024
• Asian Film Academy 2023

Hosseinpuor became known through his short films that combine emotional intimacy with carefully crafted visual storytelling, often focusing on marginalized characters, family relationships, and questions of belonging within conservative social structures.

He directed eleven narrative short films that collectively received more than 70 awards at international film festivals, establishing him as one of the most notable emerging voices in contemporary Kurdish cinema. He is also a member of the Iranian Narrative Film Association and continues developing cinematic projects rooted in social realism and poetic visual expression.