LKFF
LONDON KURDISH FILM FESTIVAL
Experience the power of Kurdish storytelling through cinema. Join us for LKFF 2025 and immerse yourself in inspiring films and cultural connections. Don’t miss out—secure your tickets now and be part of this unforgettable journey!
The London Kurdish Film Festival (LKFF) has been celebrating Kurdish cinema since 2001, bridging cultures through powerful storytelling. As a leading platform for Kurdish filmmakers, we showcase inspiring films, foster dialogue, and connect audiences worldwide. Join us in this cinematic journey!The London Kurdish Film Festival (LKFF) has been celebrating Kurdish cinema since 2001, bridging cultures through powerful storytelling. As a leading platform for Kurdish filmmakers, we showcase inspiring films, foster dialogue, and connect audiences worldwide. Join us in this cinematic journey!
Art and stories are the journey that take the mind and soul to the farthest corners of the world to connect us all. Once again, the vibrant feast of Kurdish films and filmmakers is brought through a celebration of culture, history, and arts. With diverse voices and perspectives, they stitch together the four parts of Kurdistan just as a gentle rain nourishes the land and stitches its deep cracks. They quench the thirst of a community eager to share with the world their untold stories of resistance and revolution, a revolution that led by women who are calling for change, justice, and for a world where freedom is not a dream but a reality.
Shler Murdochy (Festival Co-Director)
I always believed a revolution starts in the imagination, and the film is the fuel that drives change. Kurdish cinema has many challenges ahead, but Kurdish filmmakers go beyond and above to tell their stories, bringing them to your doorstep with resilience and vision.
Ferhan Sterk (Festival Co-Director)
The story of the London Kurdish Film Festival (LKFF) has much in common with Kurdish lives. Founded in the diaspora in 2001, LKFF was the first festival to celebrate the emergence of a specifically Kurdish cinema, following a number of award-winning feature-length films in Kurdish languages by Kurdish directors. Though overshadowed by the politics of oppression over Kurdish lives and by the lack of a settled film industry that might otherwise support Kurdish film making and screening practices, LKFF in a sense announced Kurdish cinema’s existence before Kurdish cinema had fully arrived on the scene. This makes it something of a unique case in the history of film festivals: a festival inviting a cinema to take shape.
Run and produced entirely by volunteers, LKFF has, since 2001, been a leading platform for Kurdish and Kurdish-adjacent aspects of this unique cinematic space. Twenty-four years later, in now its 14th run, LKFF celebrates distinguished work in Kurdish cinema, from Kurdistan and beyond, sharing its stories, landscapes, and languages with London audiences in 2025.LKFF is a festival in and of London, embracing the history of a film culture in the capital city, with rich layers and stories of different classes, genders, languages, and neighbourhoods and their uses and pleasures of cinema. LKFF is a festival for London; it activates the power of cinema for Kurdish and non-Kurdish citizens of the city, creating platforms for self-expression, cultural dialog and empowerment through a wide range of in-person events organized around Kurdish films from different genres and around cinematic openings. We are committed to supporting and rewarding exceptional Kurdish films and emerging artists, as a way of celebrating what is new in Kurdish culture and art, and as a political gesture for democracy and inclusiveness. Since 2001,
LKFF has shed a global light on the untold stories and experiences of Kurdish people from, mainly, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, through films, panels, and interviews with directors, producers, and actors in Kurdish cinema. Such cross-cultural dialogue between Kurdish and non-Kurdish audiences in London stands for robust citizenship and rich exchange through art and aesthetics.
LKFF has always been aware of its political and aesthetic potential and responsibility, both for Kurdish cinema and for London. We saw this responsibility at work, for instance, in the first global online Kurdish film festival, led by LKFF at the height of the pandemic in 2021. In even the short time since the next in-person festival, in 2022, there have been significant changes in the circumstances surrounding Kurdish cinema and Kurdish film festivals. There are more and more Kurdish film festivals across European capital cities, and there are new, exciting cinematic forms and alternative narratives defining contemporary Kurdish cinema. In 2025, Kurdish cinema is celebrated as a space for wide-ranging, nuanced, and liberating understandings of Kurdish experience. From the earliest planning meetings for the 14th LKFF, we have had the distinct pleasure of talking with key agents in contemporary Kurdish cinema and learning about emergent actors and tensions in this space. The 14th LKFF is set to return the city on 25 April 2023, so, to our friends and festival goers: Dance! Dîsa Govend! With all that LKFF has in common with Kurdish lives, the time has come to celebrate, both the arrival of spring, celebrated as a new year across Kurdish geographies, and the festival’s rich array of films, panel discussions, and exclusive in-person event, across two of London’s most iconic venues for a week. Our dance itself, meanwhile, will take place at Picturehouse and Rio.
Organized around the theme of celebration, the 14th LKFF is an invitation for all to come together for the freedom and equality of Kurdish people, through a wide range of events.
Opening the 14th edition on April 25 with Hisham Zaman’s last debut A Happy Day (2023), the festival will feature a selection of films from across the four parts of Kurdistan, curated into four compelling themes. This year, Kurdish short films—an important genre for experimentation, rich in innovative and alternative cinematic approaches—will tell us about the New Faces of the Urban. Then, exploring the rich variety of contemporary urban experiences across the Kurdish diaspora, LKFF this year celebrates the short documentaries on Kurdish people or by Kurdish directors under the title of Bits and Pieces: Kurdistan on the Spot. In another exciting space of work, women directors challenge settled conventions and themes, in how they use the camera, for instance, or in their interest in hidden themes, as we see in New Kurdish Documentaries and Female Narration.
London audiences will see cutting-edge Kurdish long features, all made since 2021, in the category Beyond Borders: A Journey for All, where cinema traverses borders, memories, ethnicities and gender. We also look forward, across these categories, to the participation of directors, actors and artists in the Q&A sessions, panel discussions and workshops.
LKFF also presents two panels addressing gendered and ethnic tensions in Kurdish cinematic environments. The first celebrates the exceptional narrative and aesthetic choices introduced by Kurdish women directors. The panel Reclaiming (Mother) Land – A Conversation with Kurdish Women Directors will host Ayşe Polat, Binevsa Berîvan, and Soleen Yousef to draw out and dissect some of the patriarchal tendencies in the Kurdish film industry and women’s strategies to challenge hegemonic impositions through film. The second nods to the multinational nature of LKFF in its very origins. We celebrate non-Kurdish agents of Kurdish cinema in the panel In Between Aesthetics – Documentary and Resilience, which promises a rich discussion of the ethics and aesthetics of Kurdish film-making practices through the contribution of Aylin Kuryel, Berke Baş, Fırat Yücel, Danny Mitchell, John Paul Lepers, and Manal Masri.
Finally, we are pleased to host the award-winning director Nur Ozkaya for an online workshop on making animation. 14th LKFF will close its curtain with Manal Masri’s Touching Freedom (2022) on 3 May.
As we were putting the finishing touches on our festival program, televisions aired a call for unconditional peace and democracy for Kurdish lives. As we’ve said, the story of LKFF has so much in common with Kurdish lives. Across twenty-four years, hundreds of films, and thirteen film festivals, we have come together with audiences in despair, anger, joy and curiosity. This spring we rise for a dance for all to remember, in celebration of Kurdish culture.
Dîsa govend (dance again) with Kurdish cinema!
For Interviews or further information please contact us via info@lkff.co.uk
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LKFF 2025
LKFF 2025 is coming! Get ready for an unforgettable celebration of Kurdish cinema, storytelling, and culture. Join us for inspiring films, engaging discussions, and a unique cinematic experience. Click below to explore the event and be part of the journey!
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