The Internationalist Commune of Rojava published a brochure on filmmaker Xelil Dağ called "I trust in the mountains – The birth of the guerrilla film".

As Dağ himself wrote: "For me, the words and faces of the mountains are the strongest expression of the creation days of a people. They are the only reason for me to wander through this part of the earth for years. My friends in the mountains have become the object of my field of vision and the subject of my heart. Sometimes I observed them through my lens, but mostly we were together. Sometimes I was a stranger, sometimes one of them. I walked behind them from mountain to mountain. To reach every height they climbed, every range they reached, my sweat dripped. I did everything in my power to record every word, every face. But deep inside I always felt the pain of never really being able to grasp them. Something was always missing. Next to the mountains I recorded there were always countless words and faces waiting to be captured. The words and faces that I could not record, I have painted in my heart. I call them pictures of my heart. The dark nights, the painful songs, silent laughter, pranks of childish innocence, secret loves that cannot be captured by any lens in the world, I have placed in the frame of my heart."

Xelil Dağ

Xelil Dağ (Halil Uysal) was born in Germany in 1973 as the first child of a father from Izmir and a mother from Ağrı. He fell as a martyr on 1 April 2008, killed as the result of a Turkish attack.

During primary school, he moved back and forth between Izmir and Germany. He completed middle and high school in Izmir at the Private Turkish College. Afterward, he came to Europe, where he worked during the day and took part in photography courses at night schools. During his three years in Europe, he got to know the freedom movement. In 1994, he participated in the work to establish the first Kurdish television station in Europe, MED TV.

On 1 April 1995, he travelled to the Middle East as an assistant to a German cameraman for an interview with Abdullah Öcalan. During the interview he got to know the guerrilla fighters in the central party school of the PKK better. After this interview with Abdullah Öcalan, which also represents his first meaningful work, he decided not to return and to continue his life's journey here. Since then, his life was in the mountains of Kurdistan, together with the Kurdish freedom fighters.