The Other Side of the River: The reality of the Kurdish women’s movement in Rojava

Stephen Applebaum speaks to Antonia Kilian about the making of her film, ‘The Other Side of the River’, which explores an autonomous territory in northeastern Syria that spawned a feminist revolution

Hala Mustafa, who had run away from her Isis-supporting family in Minbij with her sister (Antonia Kilian)

The Kurdish liberation of the Isis-held city of Minbij, in northern Syria, in 2016, was just the kind of event that the German filmmaker Antonia Kilian needed to happen to spur her on. Since 2015, she had been planning to explore first-hand the reality of the Kurdish women's movement in Rojava – a de facto autonomous territory in northeastern Syria that spawned a feminist revolution – but did not know how to navigate the “embargo” then in place on people entering the region.

“Step by step I was preparing,” she tells me from home, “but I had no idea if I would be successful. I heard stories of people who had managed to cross, but it was not clear for me.”

Nevertheless, as she sat in a Berlin apartment watching a TV news report showing women throwing off their black burkas, revealing colourful clothes underneath, as they ran towards female fighters who had helped to end Isis’s three-year rule, she knew it was the moment. So began a journey that led to The Other Side of the River, an eye-opening, intimate and beautifully shot film set on both sides of the Euphrates that is currently playing in international film festivals.