MÎRZA

Mirza Adır was wounded in 2013 in Serêkaniyê and lost the use of his legs. Instead of leaving the war behind, he returns to the "şikeft" — the tunnels he helped dig — and turns survival into creation. Between a hospital bed, a wheelchair and the tunnels under the earth, the film follows a body that no longer obeys and a will that does not stop, asking what resistance means once the fighting is over.

Shot over several years in Rojava and in the villages of the north, MÎRZA is a portrait of endurance told in small gestures: washing in a frozen stream, crossing a river by boat, a cat asleep on a chest, a harvest carried home. Mirza rebuilds a life underground while the world above continues without him, and the question the film keeps returning to is not whether he will walk again, but where a person begins again.

I did not want to make a film about a wound. I wanted to film what happens after it — the long, unspectacular work of beginning again. Mirza builds tunnels; I filmed the tunnels he builds inside himself. Faith, love and stubbornness are the same material there.

When the body falls, resistance does not end; it changes address. It moves underground, into the hands, into the everyday. That is the film I tried to make: quiet, close, and refusing pity.