They belong to the armed wing of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is also an active guerrilla movement. The mission of these female fighters? Defend Kurdish territory in Iraq and Syria, and defeat ISIS (the armed militants of the so-called Islamic State group), all while embodying a revolutionary ideal advocating female empowerment. As filmmaker Zaynê Akyol follows their highly regimented lives, seasoned fighters like Rojen and Sozdar openly share with us their most intimate thoughts and dreams. Even as fighting against ISIS intensifies in the Middle East, these women bravely continue their battle against barbarism. Offering a window into this largely unknown world, Gulîstan, Land of Roses exposes the hidden face of this highly mediatized war: the female, feminist face of a revolutionary group united by a common vision of freedom.
House Without Roof is about the journey of the siblings Liya, Jan and Alan who were born in the Kurdish area of the Iraq and grown up in Germany. The three of them want to fulfill their mother's last wish to bury her in her home village beside her husband who got killed in the war under the Saddam Hussein regime. On their nerve-wracking Kurdish-odyssey they are not only faced with their Kurdish extended family that does not accept the last wish of their mother but particularly with their own matters. In recent years they distanced from each other - everybody runs his own life - and whenever they are holding talks, they are mostly based on reproaches. In parallel with the run of their journey it is noticeably that in their home country the dimension of an awful conflict, that nobody can surmise, is heading for disaster.
Director Yilmaz Güney produced his most well-known film, YOL, which was honored with the Golden Palm in Cannes in 1982, from his Turkish prison cell, shortly before he broke free and fled to France. His work became a forerunner of Kurdish cinema. On his cinematic research trips, Hüseyin Tabak gathered multifaceted material on the politically polarizing director extraordinaire: from archive images, film clips, and interview sequences, he pursues the question: who was Yilmaz Güney? Who was this infamous Ugly King.
The German doctor Martina is kidnapped by a Sunnite group, back in Iraq. Her confinement becomes an ordeal of her cognitive ability and her loyalty. In the end the meaningfulness of her own existence is questioned.