“Only when we face death do we understand the value of life.” This line comes towards the end of Halkawt Mustafa’s No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman, and it stayed in my mind. Perhaps because most of us rarely think about life in those terms; we rush from one thing to another, worry about deadlines, work, money and whatever needs doing tomorrow; we are constantly busy. Then a film like this comes along and, for a moment, makes all of that seem very small.

For Vyan, the Kurdish woman at the centre of Mustafa’s film, death is not an abstract thought; she has seen it, lived beside it and survived it. Played superbly by Avan Jamal, Vyan is a Kurdish sniper whose life was destroyed during the rise of ISIS. After learning that her younger sister Helin, whom she believed she had lost, may still be alive, she returns to Mosul to find her.

No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman could easily have been turned into a straightforward war film; here we have a woman with a rifle entering dangerous territory to rescue her sister. Thankfully, it is quite the opposite, as Mustafa is more interested in what happens to people after violence, especially women and what they are left to live with. That matters enormously here because the fictional story comes from a very real history. Mustafa worked as a war photographer and met Kurdish women fighting ISIS on the frontline in 2014. Vyan was specifically inspired by a female Peshmerga sniper he met in September of that year. And there is something incredibly powerful about seeing a Kurdish woman behind a sniper rifle when you consider what ISIS was doing to women at exactly the same time.

When ISIS attacked Sinjar in August 2014, thousands of Yazidi women and girls were abducted. Many were separated from their families, sold, sexually abused, forced into marriages or treated as property. Some escaped, others were eventually rescued and many have remained missing for years. But returning home did not mean that everything was suddenly over. Survivors came back carrying terrible memories and many struggled with trauma and nightmares; others faced stigma and isolation. Women who had children as a result of rape faced another painful reality when trying to return to their communities. The film’s own background material makes a point of saying that survival became a lifelong struggle for many of these women. That history is always there in the background of Vyan’s story. She is a sniper and very good at what she does; she also learned to shut down her emotions because that is how she survives.

That connects to being a sniper; she has to wait, watch, control her breathing and remain completely focused. Panic can get her killed and emotions can distract her and Vyan seems to have learned to live her entire life in much the same way, until she can’t. This is where Avan Jamal completely blew me away. Her performance is incredible; she never needs to spell out Vyan’s suffering. Much of what she feels comes through without words; even when she seems completely composed, there is a sadness in her that never disappears. And when those emotions finally begin to come through, it is heartbreaking.

I cried so much watching this film, and it wasn’t because the film was trying too hard to make me cry. It was Jamal’s performance that got to me, especially in those moments when Vyan barely said anything, yet you could understand exactly what was happening inside her. Then there is the title itself: No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman. It immediately changes the way we think about the woman holding the gun.

ISIS treated women as people who could be controlled, abused, bought and sold. Against that image stands a Kurdish woman with a rifle, fighting the very men whose ideology considered women beneath them. There is an obvious irony in that the woman they considered weak becomes the person they fear. But Mustafa doesn’t make the mistake of suggesting that putting a weapon into Vyan’s hands somehow fixes what happened to her. Killing does not erase trauma and revenge does not return a stolen childhood, murdered parents or missing family members. Vyan can fight back, but she still has to live with what happened. That, for me, makes this film superb! We often describe women who survive terrible things as “strong”. Sometimes that word bothers me; what choice did many of these women actually have? They survived because they had to; calling someone strong can sometimes make us forget what they were forced to survive in the first place.

Another important decision was shooting the film in Mosul itself, which gives the film an uncomfortable reality. You begin looking at those destroyed buildings and thinking about what was there before. Then war arrived; that human side of destruction is far more frightening than another huge explosion could ever be. And this is why No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman affected me as much as it did. The fact that the film isn’t about the war itself, but about its aftermath and what happened to the people who lived through it, makes it even more powerful.

And those words again: “Only when we face death do we understand the value of life.” They hit me much harder than I expected. Most of us are fortunate enough not to live Vyan’s reality, yet perhaps that is exactly why those words matter. We rush through our lives because somewhere inside us we assume there will always be another day, but there might not be. It’s a simple thought, but sometimes simple thoughts are the ones we most need to hear.

I started watching No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman expecting a powerful story about a Kurdish female sniper and the fight against ISIS. I finished it thinking about women, survival, family, trauma and the strange way human beings continue living after experiencing things that should have destroyed them. And, unexpectedly, I also found myself thinking about my own life, and that doesn’t happen to me very often with films; this one got me.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of Venice Film Festival

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