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After your film The Wounded Camera, you fled from Iraq to Finland. What made the film so controversial? While I was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, I was harassed by my professors, and I fled to Kurdistan. I was interrogated more than once by a teacher there, who was a member of the Ba’ath Party. He told me “if you don’t behave, I will put you behind the sun”. What did that mean? I have no idea. I hadn’t been politically active. Saddam was still in power, so anyone who did so faced execution. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq was autonomous. Iraqis who went there were automatically labelled as dissidents in Baghdad – which put my family in danger. I gave myself a Kurdish name, Ouazad Othman which means free man in Kurdish. I made the film The Wound of the Camera, about the forced migration of millions of people when Saddam’s army entered Kurdistan after the uprising in 1991. The people migrated towards the mountain, where they were stranded and left homeless at the borders. The film was a direct criticism of the authorities and their treatment of the Kurdish population. It was a Kurdish story.
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