The First Movie

About children in a Kurdish Iraqi village making films.

I gave the kids these cameras and no tuition, no rules – handing over the means of production – and asked them to shoot whatever they wanted


The bed where I slept. Woke up to find (killer) scorpions.


By now one of my favourite films was Mohamed Ali Talebi’s Iranian movie The Boot, about a kid’s red boot, so I brought one everywhere.


Mohammad filmed a boy playing in the mud and improvised a poetic voice-over.


We projected the footage the kids shot on bed sheets in their village.