By Salwa Nakhoul Carmichael

BRUSSELS, Belgium – Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have never been to the Kurdistan Region, but they are happy that a film they directed together is being screened Thursday at the 1st European Union Film Festival in Sulaimani.

Kid with a Bike, which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes in 2011, is one of 14 films from as many European countries chosen for the May 10-16 festival in Sulaimani, Kurdistan’s second city and its cultural capital.

In an interview with Rudaw in Brussels, the EU capital, the brothers said they would love to visit Kurdistan if invited.

“As a matter of fact I believe the Kurds have the right to have their country and their nation; there is a language, there is a history and there are a lot of common traits,” said Luc, who is 60. “That makes it so that this people have the right to have their territory on which they can create their country and their nation.”

The festival, whose main sponsor is the Sulaimani-based non-profit Hiwa Foundation, debuted Sunday at an auditorium in the Amna Suraka museum named after the late Turkish-born Kurdish filmmaker, Yilmaz Guney.

The Dardenne brothers liked the idea that their film is screened at a hall named after the internationally-known Kurdish film legend.

“Guney is a filmmaker who created his cinema in relation to reality. He questioned reality. His films asked questions about the society in which he was living,” said Luc.

Living in Turkey, where even speaking the Kurdish language was banned at the time and freedoms were severely curtailed, Guney wrote most of his films in prison. He died as a political refugee in France.

Kid with a Bike is about a motherless boy in search of his father who abandoned him at a center for children in a small Belgian town, explained Jean-Pierre, who is 63.

“In our movies the characters are not chatty. They are people who do not speak much with words but communicate a lot with their body,” said Luc.

The brothers, who have won nine prizes together, have been collaborating for the past 40 years.

They launched their career with videos about the hard life in working class towns in Wallonie, the French-speaking region of Belgium. In this they share with Guney, many of whose films were devoted to the plight of ordinary, working-class people in Turkey.

The Dardenne brothers said they find their stories in newspapers and books or from people they meet. These stories then raise many questions that they try to answer in their films.

They got the idea for Kid with the Bike in Tokyo, where in 2002 a female judge told them about a boy in the suburbs who was left in an orphanage by a father who never took him back.

“In the real world, the true story of this kid does not end well but in our films we do not copy reality,” said Luc.

The festival theme is “Dialogue and Reconciliation through cultural interaction for a Peaceful Iraq.” HIWA said the festival is designed “to promote shared values such as mutual tolerance, peaceful coexistence and common understanding.”

The films for the festival were chosen by EU embassies as well as the EU delegation in Iraq.

The 14 films are from Latvia, Italy, Austria, Spain, Hungary, France, Greece, Cyprus, Belgium, United Kingdom, Poland, Romania, Germany and the Netherlands.

Rudaw