Friday 27th June 2025
h. 8.45 PM
Cinema, Identity and
the Exile Paradox
Conversation with
Mano Khalil, Cinema Prize
by: Antonello Zanda
Kurdish Language
TO FOLLOW
FILM PROJECTION
“Neighbours” (2021),
by Mano Khalil, 84 min.
Biography
Mano Khalil was born in Syrian Kurdistan. He studied History and Law at the University of Damascus and in 1987 moved to then Czechoslovakia to study cinema. He worked for Slovak television until 1996, when he shot a film in Syria about the Kurds, “The place where God sleeps”, and was then forced to leave. He moved to Switzerland, where he consolidated his career as a director of fiction and documentaries. In 2012, he founded his own production company, Frame Film. In 2021, ‘Neighbours’ had its world premiere at over two hundred film festivals, including the Locarno and Shanghai Film Festivals, and received seventy awards worldwide. Currently, Mano Khalil is working on two films: a documentary and a fiction film, entitled “Moments”.
Motivation Prize
The irony, at once bitter and alienating, holds together a film of great dramatic tension like “Neighbours”, by Mano Khalil. The world seen through a child’s eyes, who in his naivety has to face the twisted knots of history alone, is the setting for the lives of an entire people. Thus the metonymic character of the film, never exhibited but rather implied, constitutes the strength of an extraordinary film that denounces the closeness and distance between worlds that should communicate with respect for human dignity, cultures and linguistic diversity. Instead, little Sero, from his earliest days at school, in a Syrian village in the early 1980s, experiences on his skin the oppretion’s violence that torments his development and cuts off his language, that which is the first instrument of discovery and knowledge of the world. Maturity for him means grasping a truth that is difficult to understand. And the Syrian teacher, who should be guiding him in his growth, instead clips his wings, wants to extinguish his voice and builds prospects of hatred and violence for his eyes. In all the same way, the Kurdish people and culture are suffocated and dismembered in four nations that want to erase their history: this horizon is slowly drawn in the child’s eyes, who instead experiences in his social and human relations the richness of diversity and the strength of close affection. In this film, evidently marked by its director’s personal experiences and memories, the theme of language constitutes a political and central terrain for the survival and struggle for self-determination of an entire people. In this sense, the Ostana Prize‘s the recognition of a resistance trait that Kurdish shares with all the languages of the world.
PARTNERS
Comune di Ostana
The Ostana Prize celebrates the international support received
from the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages, and from two reference institutions in the linguistic field: the ELEN network (European Language Equality Network) and the NPLD network (Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity).
