Sherko Abbas

Sherko Abbas

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Most Known for...

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Paper Puppet Testimony 2021

Abbas’s experimental documentary, Paper Puppet Testimony, collects the stories of Kurdish women in the Red Prison. Although the prison has been turned into a museum, the histories commemorated there are biased and focus primarily on stories of prisoners belonging to political parties in power. There is no mention of the captivity and torture endured by women prisoners. The political establishment has been unwilling to address and confront the atrocities committed against them. In his video, Abbas resists the erasure of these women’s experiences and reckons with the horrors of the past.
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Encounters on the Tigris, Part 3 2022

In the final film of the Encounters on the Tigris trilogy, Abbas travels by boat to Al-Amarah to discover the rich diversity of flora and fauna along the river, before travelling to Al-Hammar marshes where locals reflect on the politically motivated drought of 1991, and the ongoing effects on local communities’ socio-economic wellbeing and access to water.
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Silence Along the River 2021

This footage is part of an old archive taken by the filmmaker’s father Abbas Abdulrazaq, a former Kurdish fighter and cameraman. In 1985 he accompanied a group of Peshmarga to document their activity during a mission to attack one of the army’s camps in the north of Iraq. They took the Sirwan river by a small raft to cross the area which was controlled by the Iraqi army. Despite all the risks they have taken, the battle didn’t happen. Consequently, my father filmed them when they were singing a song.