Kurdish women from a cinematographic perspective: a discussion about the film Girls of the Sun

Abstract

This article discusses the film Girls of the Sun (2018), directed by the French filmmaker Eva Husson, considering the representations of the Kurdish people and their struggles, especially the female resistance to the Islamic State. The objective is to evaluate how the film establishes and presents the Kurdish situation - in the West/East opposition - in relation to female representation, mainly as a new way of portraying armed conflicts in audiovisual productions and, also, in the work of journalistic coverage, since, in general, the Kurdish question is not very important in the West due to geographical distance and cultural differences. We take the narrative elements of the film as discursive materials of great aesthetic and political relevance when producing speeches that often seem distant from the viewer, even though it is a fictional narrative based on real events. For that, we use theoretical references that support some concepts pertinent to such discussion, such as Orientalism, social representations, cultural identity, discourse, in addition to the geopolitical and social contextualization of Kurdistan and related territories.