New award-winning documentary produced by Gulay Kilicaslan: “Night and Fog in Kurdistan”

The documentary film Night and Fog in Kurdistan, directed by Kurdish filmmaker Shilan Saadi and produced by Keywan Fahimi and our faculty member Dr. Gulay Kilicaslan, recently won Best Foreign Feature Documentary at the Female Eye Film Festival at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto. The film has also received Best International Documentary (8th Amicorti International Film Festival, Rome), Equality Feature (JACKSON DOC Film Festival, Tennessee), and Best Canadian Film (6th Human-Environment Care Film Festival, Toronto).

Night and Fog in Kurdistan follows seven Yezidi teenage survivors of the 2014 ISIS genocide over five years, tracing their difficult migration journey from camps in Northern Kurdistan–Turkey to Europe. Using innovative mixed methods of documentary making, namely graphics, maps, archival research, and first-person storytelling, the film documents the lasting trauma of genocide, the gendered and intersectional impacts of displacement, and the resistance of these young women as they turn their cameras on themselves, sharing their survival and growth through multiple displacements. This documentary is closely connected to Dr. Kilicaslan’s SSHRC-IDG funded research on Yezidi survivors’ resettlement in Canada after the 2014 ISIS genocide, and Shilan and Gulay are currently collaborating on another documentary in Canada based on this ongoing research.

You can find the trailer for this documentary below.