True Colours Boards Venice Peshmerga Sniper Drama
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- True Colours boarded international sales on Halkawt Mustafa's drama 'No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman' ahead of its world premiere Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival in September.
- Avan Jamal stars as a female Peshmerga sniper who travels to Mosul to rescue her younger sister from ISIS, confronting the violence she survived and 'the shadows of the person she has become.'
- The supporting cast includes Thorbjørn Harr, Kanar Sarchl and Kader Jalal alongside lead Jamal.
- Mustafa wrote, directed and produced the film, drawing on years of conversations with real Kurdish women who fought ISIS as source material.
- The project follows Mustafa's prior work on the same subject — his 2015 documentary 'The Women ISIS Fears,' 'Hiding Saddam Hussein' (about the farmer who hid Saddam for 235 days in 2003), and Iraq's 2016 Oscar submission 'The Classic.'
- Hene Films (Mustafa, Janne Hjeltnes and John M. Jacobsen) produces in co-production with Sweden's The Chimney Pot and Iraq's La Media.
- Fabio Tucci, Head of Acquisitions at True Colours, called the film an 'immensely engaging cinematic experience' that 'powerfully portrays the Kurdish people's struggle through the eyes of a heroic female fighter.'
Why it matters: The deal gives an under-distributed Kurdish-authored war story — centered on a female combatant against ISIS — a foothold at one of cinema's most prestigious launchpads, with True Colours now positioned to sell it into Western festivals and arthouse buyers ahead of its September Venice debut.
