Human Rights Watch Film Festival brings Kurdish-Norwegian filmmaker Zaradasht Ahmed’s Nowhere to Hide, winner at IDFA 2016, to London’s Barbican. Click here to win tickets to the screening this Friday!

 

Nowhere to Hide follows male nurse Nori Sharif through five years of dramatic change, providing unique access into one of the world’s most dangerous and inaccessible areas – the “triangle of death” in central Iraq. After US troops left Iraq in 2011, Kurdish-Norwegian director Zaradasht Ahmed gave Nori Sharif a camera and taught him how to use it, asking him to capture the reality of life in his community and the hospital where he worked.

Sharif began filming stories of survivors and the hope of a better future as American and Coalition troops retreat from Iraq in 2011. But as conflicts continued with Iraqi militias, the population and the majority of the hospital’s staff fled. Sharif was one of the few who remained. When ISIS advanced on Jalawla in 2014 and sieged the city, Sharif turned the camera on himself as he faced a vital decision: to stay and dedicate himself to treating those he had vowed to help, or to leave and protect his family. Nowhere to Hide was one of the winners at the prestigious International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2016.

Director and Photographer Zaradasht Ahmed was born and raised in Northern Iraq. He has many years of experience working with documentary filmmaking in the Middle East, North-Africa and Asia, as well as training local people in documentation. The first person narrative in Nowhere to Hide enables an immersive and uncompromising insight into the resilience and fortitude of a male nurse who is working and raising his children in one of the most dangerous and inaccessible areas in the world.

The film is screened as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which returns to the Barbican for another year with topical and provocative feature documentaries that grapple with the challenges of defending human rights around the world.

The screening is sold out, but keep an eye out for returns tickets – or click here to find out more about how to win two tickets to Friday’s screening.