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The trope of the lone action hero with near-superhuman strength gets a gender switch in “No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman,” a visually impressive drama about a resourceful female Peshmerga sniper. Although selected as Iraq’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, the third fiction feature from Norwegian-Kurdish helmer Halkawt Mustafa (“Red Heart,” “El Clásico”) may fall between two stools for Western viewers: There’s not enough action for genre fans and the narrative’s blend of melodrama and earnestness may turn off highbrow arthouse viewers. But it’s a different story in MENA territories where Sony/Empire has already nabbed distribution rights. Regional and Kurdish diaspora audiences should appreciate the strong visual and technical craftmanship used in this harrowing tale.

The narrative centers on Vyan (striking London-based Kurdish thesp Avan Jamal, impressive), a 24-year-old Kurdish émigré to Norway who is visiting Iraqi Kurdistan with her parents and younger sister Helin in 2014, when Islamic State (IS) launches an attack. Their parents are murdered and Vyan and Helin are sold as IS sex slaves. Ever resilient, Vyan manages to kill the man who bought her and make her way to Peshmerga territory. There, she joins an elite unit of female fighters as a sniper.

As Vyan’s poetic voiceover narration states, Peshmerga means “before death” and its fighters enter combat out of strength, not out of fear. Certainly, Vyan is fearless. She reckons that she has killed more than 100 of the enemy in three years. Given that, as the title notes, IS fighters believe that there is “No Paradise If You Are Killed by A Woman,” it’s no wonder they have placed a million-dollar bounty on her head.

After heroically preventing an IS suicide truck bomber in an armored vehicle from attacking her unit’s base, the heavily wounded Vyan returns to Norway to recover. There, a government official (Thorbjørn Harr) offers her a difficult choice: accept a new identity and government protection (they fear the fact that she is an IS target could endanger other Norwegian citizens) or be prosecuted for fighting for another country. Luckily, Norwegian civilians don’t have to worry. A phone call to the family’s old landline confirms that Helin remains trapped in Mosul, in the clutches of an IS fighter known as the Swedish sniper. Loyal Vyan prepares for what may be her final mission: to singlehandedly rescue her sister.

The last half of the film feels as if it could easily be adapted into a tense video game as it follows Vyan silently creeping through tunnels and crawling through the aftermath of IS carnage. It certainly gives a more detailed picture of how a sniper operates, and the lonely patience required for the job, than Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” ever did. Vyan uses logic and the help of friendly Kurdish commander from the Iraqi government forces in Mosul to locate the IS snipers preventing civilians from leaving the devastated city.

Research for multi-hyphenate Mustafa’s 2015 TV project “The Women ISIS Fears” and his time as a war photographer seeing strong female fighters inspired “No Paradise,” which he dedicates to his daughters. Like the helmer’s previous features, it proudly incorporates Kurdish customs and traditions, from the “singing” that Vyan’s rifle performs to the traditional tunes sung by her Peshmerga captain and the Kurdish commander in Mosul.

Highlights of a polished technical package include the prowling camerawork of Norwegian DP John Erling H. Fredriksen and the film’s use of actual Mosul locations. The shocking ruins of what was once a thriving population center attest to a brutal military campaign to liberate the ancient city from IS. Also worthy of special mention in a film where the main character spends much of her time in silence is the tension-building sound design by Mattias Eklund and Jan Kasskawo.

Panama’s Abner Benaim has boarded as a co-director of the fiction series “School of the Americas” (“Escuela de las Américas”), which will star two of Chile’s most internationally renowned thespians: Daniela Vega, who headed the Oscar-winning “A Fantastic Woman,) and Alfredo Castro, a Pablo Larrain regular who’s also starred in a slew of Latin American projects.

The project has been selected for the Co-Production and Financing Forum at Madrid-based confab Iberseries & Platino Industria which takes place Sept. 29-Oct. 2.

Benaim was an obvious addition to the project given its subject matter and setting. “School of the Americas” begins with an exhumation at the site of the 1983 El Jazmín massacre, which yields a graduation photograph of four commandos with their faces scratched out and a pendant stamped Fort Gulick, the U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone, site of the infamous U.S. Army School of the Americas.

Panamanian-American human rights investigator Inés Vega recognizes the massacre’s signature: counterinsurgency doctrine taught at the School. When someone tries to kill her, the cold case turns personal. Tracking four graduates across three continents, she uncovers what the School really taught – and who is still protecting its legacy.

Benaim joins co-director Oscar Godoy who also has close ties to Larraín, having been first AD on Larraín’s “The Count,” “The Club,” “Neruda,” “No” and “Tony Manero.” Godoy was recently second unit director on Fabula’s “Someone Has to Know,” which ranked among Netflix’s global top ten for non-English-language series.

His feature “Ulysses” screened at a string of festivals, starting with the San Sebastián Film Fest and culminating at Chile’s Santiago Film Fest (Sanfic) where it won Best Chilean Film.

Benaim, Panama’s most internationally renowned filmmaker, has represented his country three times at the Oscars, starting with his documentary “Invasion,” about the U.S. 1989 invasion of Panama, followed by “Yo No Me Llamo Rubén Blades” and “Plaza Catedral,” the latter making the Academy shortlist and earning Benaim a Premios Platino nomination for screenplay. His debut feature “Chance” remains the highest-grossing Panamanian film ever released.

Its producers Seedling Media Productions (Panama) and La Panda Productions (U.S./Spain) are targeting 2028 for principal photography to begin, provided all the financing is in place.

“The School of the Americas was a real school, located in the Panama Canal Zone; for half a century, it taught officers from across Latin America. We are not making a series about monsters — monsters are an alibi. We are making one about a curriculum: the fact that this was written down, graded and taught, and the men who graduated went home and became somebody’s father. Violence isn’t born. It’s taught,” said La Panda’s Guillermo Escalona, co-creator and executive producer alongside Brittany DeVries of Seedling Media.

Escalona, a Spanish-American screenwriter-producer based in Los Angeles, co-founder of La Panda Productions, is the co-creator and co-writer, along with Rhayuela’s Federico Durán, of the late Colombian filmmaker Jaime Osorio Márquez’s posthumous feature “The Awakening.” The supernatural action thriller was completed by Durán and José Luis Rugeles (“Alias Maria” “Rebellion”) after the director’s death following which it world-premiered at the Guadalajara International Film Festival in April, with Latido Films handling sales.

Based in Panama, Seedling Media Productions, founded in 2013 by DeVries, has a varied list of credits that include fiction and documentary features. Among them are crime thriller “Chacalería,” “I Really Love My Husband,” shot in Panama and premiered at SXSW in 2025 and documentaries “Dear Panamá,” “A World Without Orphans” and “Lost Kites,” winner of the Best Documentary Feature at the London Independent Film Awards.

Currently, Seedling is producing “Against No One” (“Denuncia Contra Nadie”), a co-production with Guatemala supported by the Ibermedia Co-Production Fund. 

Political pressure on film and television festivals emerged as a defining theme of a panel discussion Monday at the Lumière Summit in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, with Séries Mania general director Laurence Herszberg issuing the session’s most direct call for protection of programming autonomy.

“We don’t judge artists by their passport, we judge them by their works,” Herszberg said.

The panel, titled “Easy to Criticize, Impossible to Replace: Rethinking the Festival” and moderated by Rajendra Roy, chief curator of film at MoMA, brought together festival chiefs from Berlin, Cannes, Toronto, San Sebastián, Annecy, Mumbai, Durban, the Red Sea and South by Southwest. It covered three areas: audiences and community, how festivals relate to the media, and the mounting economic and political strains on festival leadership.

Herszberg was direct on the political pressure facing her and her peers. “We feel more and more under pressure from different groups,” she said. “They might be politicians, they might be just people who disagree with the representation of some countries.” As general director of Séries Mania – a free-access festival with 1,500 seats – she said controlling who walks through the door is not possible. “We have to be protected, and we still have to go on and fight for the artists,” Herszberg said.

Cameron Bailey, chief executive of the Toronto Film Festival, which launches its first formal market this year, echoed the sentiment. “Filmmakers are not their nations, and shouldn’t be treated as such by anyone,” Bailey said. He recalled joining TIFF as a programmer in 1990, “at a time when festivals felt like a completely free and open space.” Bailey pointed to TIFF’s Next Wave youth program – now 15 years old – as a long-term investment in building young audiences. “‘Obsession’ became one of the biggest sales at a film festival in a long, long time,” Bailey said, noting that Next Wave participants had championed the title. On the rationale for TIFF’s new market, Bailey said: “The market is also part of that ecosystem – I mean, a terrible way to put it would be that it’s the fertilizer of the ecosystem, but really, it’s what feeds” a constant supply of ambitious films.

Berlinale festival director Tricia Tuttle, whose event drew 450,000 admissions last year, and was at the eye of a political storm, put audience development at the center of her contribution. “The answer for me to all of these challenges is to really think about audiences,” Tuttle said, adding that reaching people who are not yet passionate cinemagoers matters as much as serving those who are.

Cannes president Iris Knobloch pointed to the breadth of her festival’s annual gathering – 40,000 accredited participants from 140 countries, with over 4,000 journalists in attendance. “For me, that is the real shining light on films and the talent all over the world,” Knobloch said.

Faisal Baltyuor, chief executive of the Red Sea Film Foundation, said his organization’s last edition sold out every screening. “We have a lot of creative talents that need that boost to make it to the international stage,” Baltyuor said, noting that 11 films the Foundation supported appeared in Venice and eight were heading to Toronto.

On the festival-press relationship, Peter Debruge – now director of the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival after a 20-year tenure at Variety, the last ten as chief critic – put the case for studio films serving discovery. “The studio-level films are the sizzle that brings the attention, the press, and the audiences to the discoveries,” Debruge said.

Maialen Beloki, deputy director of San Sebastián, pointed to shrinking press resources as a structural problem. “Each year, media send less and less critics to the festival,” Beloki said. She added that the race to break news online carries its own cost. “We are losing our capacity to talk about the films with some time and with some respect,” Beloki said.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founding director of the Film Heritage Foundation and director of the MAMI Festival in Mumbai, said his screenings of restored films regularly attract between 1,000 and 1,400 people and that all MAMI events are free of charge. “I believe that a film festival has to be for everyone,” Dungarpur said. He described the MAMI Independent outreach initiative that partnered with a major cinema chain to bring independent films to cities across India ahead of the festival proper.

Mickaël Marin, from the Annecy Animation Film Festival, said that since his appointment in 2018 he has worked to open Annecy to general audiences beyond its traditional professional base, including through a permanent exhibition space that opened last June. “We have a worldwide community of animation coming here in Annecy, from the school, from the student, up to the platform,” Marin said.

Magdalene Reddy, director of the Durban FilmMart Institute, said the core challenge in Africa is not finding audiences but reaching them in the absence of sufficient cinema infrastructure. “For us, engaging with audiences is really going into the community,” Reddy said.

When moderator Roy closed the session by asking whether festivals could survive without the American industry – demanding a yes or no – Reddy was the only panelist to answer no, while noting that her focus remains squarely on African content.