Kurdish-Iranian director wins Busan documentary prize
The Busan International Film Festival handed its top documentary prize to ‘Singing Wings,’ the debut feature by Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Hemen Khaledi, in a competition that also honored two South Korean titles.
The Mecenat Award, the festival’s chief accolade for Asian non-fiction cinema, was split between Khaledi’s portrait of migration and Ju Romi and Kim Taeil’s ‘Raining Dust’, IRNA reported.
Organisers also gave a special mention to Ko Hyoju’s ‘Relay Race’. The recognition places Khaledi, until now little known outside Kurdish film circles, among a growing generation of independent directors breaking ground on the international stage.
Shot in the village of Dareh Tafi in Iran’s western Kurdistan region, ‘Singing Wings’ intertwines the stories of three couples grappling with the prospect of leaving their homeland. At its center is an elderly woman caring for both her centenarian husband and an injured stork while her daughter prepares to join her spouse in Europe.
The film, which Khaledi developed over four years, avoids the clichés of “poverty” or “nostalgia” and instead, as the director puts it, aims to show migration “without judgement” through a deeply human lens.
The production was a joint venture spanning Georgia, Belgium and Iran, with producers Ina Tedjow, Zina Brooyan and Sargol Moradi steering the project through research, shooting and post-production. The collaboration underlines the increasingly transnational nature of documentary financing, with European backers helping to bring regional voices to global screens.
This year’s 30th Busan festival, which ran from September 17 to 26, screened more than 200 films and drew industry executives and audiences from across the world to what has become East Asia’s largest showcase of cinema.