Mano Khalil, filmmaker

Mano Khalil is a Kurdish-born film director living in Switzerland.

He grew up in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) in the 1960s in a small Kurdish family that understood no Arabic. His mother was from Bakur, his father from Rojava.

As a boy, he attended an Arabic school where the Kurdish language was absolutely forbidden—his parents told him never to say anything in Kurmancî. On my third day, his teacher wanted to see if he understood Arabic so he showed him a picture of an apple. Mano said sev, the Kurdish word. The teacher hit him hard on his hand. It was so bad his mother said she was going to kill him. The school was a prison. “We learned how to hate, not to love,” he later recalled.

He studied history and law at Damascus University. There he learned more about the outside world. He learned about human rights and about how the Syrian regime denied them to Kurds.

In the mid-80s many of his friends wanted to fight for the freedom movement, but he wanted to make films, so in 1987 he went to Czechoslovakia to study film directing as well as fiction.

Between 1990 and 1995 he worked as an independent film director for Czechoslovak and later for Slovak Television.

In the 1990s he visited Syria—and when a magazine caption called him “a Kurdish student from Syria,” he was arrested. “They asked me why I said I was a Kurd, when there were no Kurds in the country. I was sent to prison in Damascus for a short time.”

After his release, Switzerland gave him asylum, and he has lived there since 1996, working as an independent film director and producer. In 2012, he founded Frame Film Production in Bern.

In 2014 ISIS erupted in Iraq and began overrunning Syrian villages, committing unspeakable atrocities. They attacked Mano’s old village and destroyed his family’s house. “They killed my niece one day when she was outside planting trees—she died with eight other people.” After that the rest of his family became refugees.

His films include:

Oh World! (1988)

My Pain, My Hope (1989)

Embassy (1990)

My God (1990)

Oh Father (1991)

The Place where God Sleeps (1992, doc.)

Kino-ocko (Kino Eye,1995, doc.)

Triumph of Iron (1999)

Colorful Dreams (2003)

Al-Anfal, in the Name of Allah, Baath and Saddam (2005, doc.)

David the Tolhildan (2007, doc.)

My Prison, My Home (2009, doc.)

Our Garden of Eden (2010, doc.)

The Beekeeper (Der Imker, 2013, doc.)

The Swallow (Die Schwalbe, 2014).

Hafis & Mara (2018)

Neighbors (2021)

Among the highlights of his filmography:

The Beekeeper (2013)

The Beekeeper tells the true story of a Kurdish man, living in a mountain village, who kept a colony of bees. Ibrahim Gezer was wealthy, as the bees that produced 18 tons of honey. He had a happy family. But in the mid-1990s the Turkish army destroyed his life. His family was separated and his wife and children were killed. He lost his bee colony and had to run. For seven years, Ibrahim lived in Turkey on the run. At 64, he arrived in Switzerland as a refugee and tried to begin beekeeping again. He was successful even though he could not speak German. “In love with nature, he doesn’t know how to hate anyone,” Khalil said of Gezer.

The Swallow (2016)

Set in Iraqi Kurdistan, just before the rise of ISIS. “It’s a love story, but it’s also a political story. In our country, even love between two people is political. There is no space to breathe. It’s about terrorism, war crimes in Iraq and love. I’d like my next movie to be about my life as a child.”

Neighbours (2021)

In a Kurdish village in Syria, near the Turkish border, young Sero enters school. The teacher has the goal of making Kurdish children into pan-Arabic comrades. He uses a rod to forbid the Kurdish language, orders the veneration of Assad and his regime, and preaches hate to the “Zionist enemy,” the Jews. “With a fine sense of humor and satire, the film depicts a childhood experience which manages to find light moments amongst the dictatorship and dark drama.”

Khalil observes that to date his style of filmmaking is to “transmit feelings.” “Without feelings,” he says, movies “are nothing. … You have to build a friendship with your protagonist.”

Mano Khalil was interviewed by Xeyal Quertel for the NYKCC’s Kurdish Heritage Month in 2022. 

Update: Mano Khalil’s film Neighbors was the opening film at the New York Kurdish Film Festival’s sixth edition.