Baghdad, April 2003. Saddam Hussein’s regime has been toppled and for Iraqi exiles this is cause for great celebration. In Germany, Azad, a Kurdish exile is glued to his TV screen watching events unfold. He invites Iraqi friends to join him in celebrating and as they dance, sing and rejoice, a continuous stream of images from Iraq flashes across the television. Slowly however memories return and long-buried resentments and closeted secrets begin to come out and the party begins to turn into a violent settling of scores.

Mayak is a young Armenian man and part of the underground cartoon world. He dedicates himself to creating a graphic novel: 'Azad' (which means freedom both in Armenian and Kurdish), a project that looks back to 1915 when his grandfather tried to escape the Armenian genocide. He puts together this project by listening to his grandfather’s memories and it becomes a chance for him to get back in touch with his roots and build a better relationship with his family. However when Mina, a young Kurdish girl enters his life, he is forced to question his beliefs. Mayak convinces himself that she is denying the memory of the Armenian people and accusing the Kurds for also taking part in the Armenian genocide. This leads to a crisis of identity.

North Kurdistan 1990s. On a night in May, on an empty road near Amed (Diyarbakir), the lives of ten year old Gülistan and her brother Firat take an abrupt change when their father, a political journalist, and their mother are killed before their very eyes by Turkish security forces. Having lost all other relatives during the conflict, these two vulnerable young children and their newly born have to stay alive and survive on their own. The script was written jointly by Kurdish journalist Evrim Alataş and young Kurdish director Miraz Bezar and brings back to memory a time when Kurdish journalists were assassinated in broad daylight on a daily basis.

A few newborn babies and small children orphaned by the US invasion of Iraq are brought to a cafe near the border of Turkey and Iran in South Kurdistan to be sold. At the same time a group of pregnant women want to sell their unborn babies to make ends meet and go to the same café, where a terrorist is trying to buy babies that can be turned into fighters. This is a chilling story of child trafficking.

Just weeks before the Anfal campaign of 1988 two Kurdish lovers Herman and Adar come close to achieving their dreams of marriage. When the young man, Herman goes to his fiancé’s village to meet her he finds it demolished by Saddam’s army and her gone. As he searches, we discover that she and her village have fled to the Turkish border seeking refuge but here are faced only with more brutality and herded into camps with no basic needs. Adar’s family discovers that she is pregnant and they demand that she gets rid of the child that brings shame on their family. However it is the only thing that binds her to her beloved Herman and she refuses.

Yaro has fled from Iraq with his wife and they now live in Holland. He is making a film about a boy called Temo, a survivor of the massacre. Yaro’s existence is shadowed by the ghosts of his dead father and his missing brother. Yaro is cheating on his wife and blames her for not being able to conceive, even though it is him who is infertile. As the film reaches its peak, his wife takes revenge. ‘Hope’ is a bittersweet, poetic and humorous movie.