“I Wanted to Understand the Brainwash”: ‘THR Presents’ Q&A With ‘Rojek’ Director Zaynê Akyol

Zaynê Akyol’s latest documentary feature, Rojek, was born out of her time working on the 2016 documentary Gulîstan, Land of Roses. In that film, the director followed a group of female soldiers in Iraqi Kurdistan as she searched for her old babysitter (the titular Gulîstan), who had mysteriously vanished one day in Akyol’s childhood to go to war. “She was always in my mind, I often thought about her,” Akyol explained during a THR Presents panel, powered by Vision Media. “I studied cinema, [and] after my studies I decided to make a film about her journey, what happened to her. When I arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan to shoot that film, which was the third of August 2014, it was the exact same day that the Islamic State attacked the region. So all the people were trying to escape and run towards Turkey, and we were entering the country. It was not possible to make a film about about her journey, and people that knew her, but I managed to film a troop of Kurdish women who were training, and then they went [to] fight ISIS.”

Akyol would go on to discover after filming that almost all of the women who had been a part of Gulîstan were killed by ISIS in battle, prompting her to consider the topic of Rojek. “I thought about making another film, but this time focusing on the exact opposite of those women who are feminists, environmentalists, [who] wanted to establish a feminist and democratic society,” she says. “That’s how I came to do Rojek. I wanted to understand the brainwash, how someone can explain that killing people is okay. And they feel good about it, actually. So it’s my personal quest to understand that ideology, the logic behind it.”

Filming both projects involved working under incredibly dangerous and uncomfortable conditions. “[Gulîstan] was quite dangerous because you never knew what would happen. And on top of that there is no electricity. We had [a] generator there, we were living in the forest. We had a lot of technical challenges.” For Rojek, since the film is almost entirely comprised of talking head interviews with ISIS members in prison in Syria, that hazard was even more extreme. “The dangerous thing was that there were a lot of sleeper cells,” she recalls. “So a lot of booby traps, a lot of explosions, a lot of suicide bombers. It’s another kind of danger. And you never [knew] what would happen because it’s a war zone.”

Assembling a crew for such unusually perilous filmmaking was also not easy. “For three years, I was looking for a cinematographer that would come with me, and no one would,” Akyol recounts. “And on top of that, the border we used closed and opened, closed and opened, because it was exactly the wartime. After three years, I really liked the work of Nicolas Canniccioni, and he agreed to come with me. I was also with Arshia Shakiba, who was doing the sound, and also the cinematography after a while, because we stayed six months in the region. At the end of the filming, we were only two.”

For more about Rojek, watch the full conversation in; this edition of THR Presents is sponsored by Meta Films.