The film Neighbours by Mano Khalil will open the 13th edition of the London Kurdish Film Festival.

The festival will kick off on 23 September.

Synopsis of the film

In a Kurdish village in Syria and on the border with Turkey, little Sero attends school for the first time. A new teacher had arrived with the goal of making strapping pan-Arabic comrades out of the Kurdish children. He uses a rod to forbid the Kurdish language, orders the veneration of Assad and his regime while  preaching hate to the “Zionist enemy”- the Jews. With a fine sense of humour and satire, the film depicts a childhood experience which manages to find light moments amongst the dictatorship and dark drama. 

The director

Mano Khalil is a Kurdish-Swiss film director living in Switzerland.He studied history and law at Damascus University and moved to Czechoslovakia in 1987 to study fiction and film direction. Between 1990 and 1995, he worked as an independent film director for Czechoslovak and later for Slovak Television. Since 1996, he has lived in Switzerland, working as an independent film director and producer.