Kurdish-Austrian director Kurdwin Ayub recently won the Special Jury Prize for her film Moon at the 77th Locarno Film Festival, held from August 7-17. Her films frequently address the fight against patriarchal power structures and the struggle for women’s rights. “I write stories, and these themes just naturally come out,” she told Kurdistan Chronicle.

Ayub was born in 1990 in Duhok in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. “In 1991, when I was just a baby, my parents and I fled Iraq due to the war. We spent several months in a camp at the Turkish border before we were able to make it to Austria. It was a very traumatic journey for my parents. My mother gave birth to her second child in the camp, but sadly, the baby died there,” she told Kurdistan Chronicle.

When she was a child, she always wanted to tell stories. “I grew up in front of the TV, watching all kinds of films and series. It was the only path I wanted to pursue. I studied painting at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Initially, I made animated films and later performed in front of the camera myself. I started small, but step by step, my crews grew larger, and I was able to tell more complex stories.”

“My most important awards include the First Feature Award for Sun at the Berlinale Film Festival 2022 and the Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival 2024 for Moon.”

Moon and Sun

Her latest movie, Moon, is about former martial artist Sarah, who leaves Austria to train three sisters from a wealthy Jordanian family. “I chose to shoot it in Jordan because it’s a very liberal country. The theme of the movie isn’t specifically about Jordanian women,” Ayub told Kurdistan Chronicle. 

“Andria Tayeh, a famous actress, plays Nour, the main daughter of this family. She speaks Jordanian Arabic, so I cast all the other family members as Jordanians as well, even though the parents of the family in the film live in the Gulf.”

“The movie is about an Austrian woman, whom you might expect to be the ‘white savior’ that rescues girls from a powerful Middle Eastern crime family. But these expectations are misleading. The film is about money and power, but also about patriarchy,” she said. 

Ayub underlined that “gender inequality is still an issue in Middle Eastern countries – and European countries too! In the end, Moon is about the patriarchal similarities between the West and the East.”

Another film, Sun, is about three friends who shoot a music video in Austria while wearing burqas, which makes them famous overnight, especially among Kurdish-Muslims.

“The idea came to me when I discovered a girl band that sang Muslim songs and became famous. At first, I wanted to make a documentary about them, but they never responded,” she said. 

“So, I thought about my own life and experiences as an immigrant girl who wanted to be famous. I remembered how I felt different from my Austrian friends, and that this difference wasn’t always negative. Some of them wanted to be like me – but a better version. The movie is about cultural appropriation and how it feels to be the person whose shaky identity gets ‘stolen’ for fame.”

Mixing identities

Her feature documentary Paradise! Paradise! (2016), which won the best camera honor at the Diagonale – Festival of Austrian Film, follows the story of her father, who returns to Kurdistan from Austria to buy an apartment in the Kurdistan Region as an investment.

“It wasn’t difficult for me to make this movie because I was alone with my father. I didn’t have a crew with me, and Kurdistan was relatively safe, even during the war against ISIS. When we went to the front line, it felt surreal because I wasn’t scared,” Ayub said. 

“Having a camera with you, looking through the lens, makes everything feel like a movie, even when you’re filming real life. I guess that was my method to avoid fear. It was very important for me to make this movie, so I had to find ways to be strong enough to do it,” she added.

Ayub said that despite living in Austria, she visits Kurdistan a lot. “I guess I have a kind of lost or mixed identity. I grew up with my parents, who are culturally Kurdish, while my friends in school were typical Austrian,” she told Kurdistan Chronicle. “I feel that I carried the trauma of my parents and the warmth of Kurdish culture, but at the same time, I wanted to rebel against being the ‘nice Kurdish girl’ because I saw the freedom my Austrian friends had.”