Helin Çelik and Rojava Film Commune
11.3.2026 | 14h
Institute for Fine Art | Art and Time | Media
Studio Buildig, Lehárgasse 8
1st floor, Pavillon, 1060 Wien
The Rojava Film Commune is a collective of grassroots filmmakers whose creative practices are grounded in the broader political vision of building a stateless democracy. Their films emerge from a process of learning through practice, serving both as artistic exploration and as documentation of their resistance, challenges, and resilience.
They aim to build a local film culture: through film production, film screenings, travelling cinema to local villages, facilitating discussions about the role of film within the wider revolutionary society, translating films to the local language, starting an international film festival, and establishing a Film Academy. The Film Academy offers one-year courses in Kurdish language and international film history, film theory, and all the stages of film production, taught by local and international film professionals. The structure of the Academy is horizontal, thus allowing the students to co-organise it. The Commune aims to reclaim cinema and film as a means of reimagining society, making films “from our culture, from our people to our people”.
In the lecture, Helin Celik, a Kurdish filmmaker based in Vienna who spent the past year in Rojava working closely with the Rojava Film Commune, will speak about her current production shot in Rojava and her collaboration with the collective. In addition, a member of the commune will discuss their working methods, guiding principles, and their most recent production.
Helin Çelik is a Kurdish interdisciplinary artist who is based in Vienna, Austria. In her works, she investigates different geographies of political struggle and reconstructs existing narratives by interweaving narrative and nonfiction instruments. She strives to unpack the relationship between political and cinematographic memory by blending personal history and using new visual grammars and intends to diversify the possibilities of media-making for imagining another future.