Avan Jamal sears the screen as Vyan, a crackerjack, Kurdish female sniper, dealing with past trauma, who returns to the war-torn Iraqi city of Mosul in order to find her kidnapped sister in Halkawt Mustafa’s stirring, gritty thriller, No Paradise If You are Killed by a Woman.
Set in 2014, the film centers on Vyan, who lost her parents in the ISIS assault but has a sister, Helin, who has been trafficked into sex slavery and then forced to marry her ISIS captor, who is also a sniper.
Vyad is a Norwegian citizen and she, her parents and her sister took the journey back to Iraq not knowing Isis was lying in wait. “We wanted to see where we came from,” she explains to a Norwegian government rep, asking why they returned. There is now a $1 million bounty on Vyad’s head via ISIS. And although she is forbidden to do so, she takes it upon herself to go back to Iraq to find Helin and bring her home and she engages a former mentor for help.
Most of the running time of this gripping, nail-biting film is devoted to the events leading to Vyan’s locating where her sister is being held and doing what she must to free her — a perilous and risky endeavor. During a phone conversation with her sister’s rapist husband, he shrieks at her, “Your sister is my wife. She is pregnant. If you come for me, I will cut off her head.” That’s the kind of monster she’s dealing with.
No Paradise If You are Killed by a Woman works so well thanks to taut direction, stunning cinematography by John-Erling Holmenes Fredriksen, a haunting score by Trond Bjerknes and, of course, the fearless performance by Jamal.
And even with all the death, destruction, heartbreak and inhumanity depicted onscreen, the film manages to slice out a bit of hope, that one day “the enemy” won’t be around to destroy the hopes and dreams of these valiant women simply trying to survive in a world where the patriarchy can only see them as disposable baby machines.
No Paradise If You are Killed by a Woman is being presented Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival.
The film has been selected as Iraq’s International Feature Oscar submission.
In Kurdish, Norwegian and Arabic, with English subtitles.
