Skip to content
PG12

ALLIHOPA: THE DALKURD STORY

Genre
Drama, Sport and Documentary
Running time
93 minutes
Year
2023
Language
Kurdish, Swedish and English
Subtitle
English
Country
Iraq, Sweden, United States of America (USA) and Canada
Director
Kordo Doski
Bio
Producer
Kordo Doski, Lina Hanson, Jose Moreno Brooks, David Oyelowo, Bailey Dahlgren, Paul Canterna, Ary Dosky
Cast
Rawez Lawan, Peshraw Azizi, Rewan Amin, Amir Azrafshan, Adil Kizil, Andreas Brännström, Ramazan Kizil
Scriptwriter
Kordo Doski, Jose Moreno Brooks
The unprecedented success of Dalkurd, a football team originally set up to give young Kurdish refugees in a working-class Swedish town something to do, is an uplifting story of triumphant underdogs that also highlights the situation of the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland. Despite local indifference, the team rose rapidly through the divisions to the point where we meet them, about to play a nail-biting match that could catapult them into the top tier of Swedish soccer. Along the way, we hear the players’ harrowing personal stories and grow to understand the complex character of the club, where football is crucial but the Kurdish struggle for independence is the name of the game.

Other movies

NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE

Director: Ricardo Curtis

When a meteor crashes into Colepepper Zoo, it releases a virus that turns infected animals into slavering zombies. The few remaining unaffected must band together to escape the virus, find a cure and - most importantly - defeat the Bunny King, a mad mutant beast who wants to spread the virus beyond the zoo to animals everywhere. Young wolf Gracie teams up with mountain lion Dan to find and warn her pack; Xavier, the movie-obsessed lemur; Frida, the fiery capybara; ostrich Ash and the untrustworthy monkey Felix make up the rest of the squabbling, motley crew. A colourful tale with echoes of the recent global pandemic, the Zoopocalypse is a treat for adult animation buffs as much as children.

MONSIEUR AZNAVOUR

Director: Mehdi Idir

Charles Aznavour, the son of Armenian immigrants who became a defining voice of France, died in 2018 aged 94. Two years later, his sons, Mischa and Nicolas, announced they had been working with their father on a biopic to be released this year: Aznavour’s centenary. This stunning musical drama is an intimate portrait of the artist’s life that's packed with biographical information. Growing up in poverty gave him an unswerving determination to reach the top; by the 1940s, he was playing cabarets with Pierre Roche, but his ambition was a solo career and a mass audience. Tahir Rahim plays Aznavour in a drama punctuated with disarmingly honest anecdotes from family members, giving us both the man and, of course, his music.

BLACK DOG

Director: Guan Hu

While China buzzes in anticipation of the Beijing Olympics, Lang returns from a decade in prison to his home town to find it largely deserted, its crumbling concrete blocks being torn down to make way for a new industrial city. The exodus of humans means that the area is now overrun with stray dogs; Lang, needing a job, joins a hastily assembled extermination team supposed to round them up but, when a dog suspected of having rabies adopts him, he realizes his real mission is to save the animals, including the ones at the nearly deserted local zoo.. In a riveting, almost wordless performance, Eddie Peng shows Lang recover his humanity, even as the landscape around him becomes increasingly desolate.

SANTOSH

Director: Sandhya Suri

When Santosh’s husband, a policeman in a rural district in North India, is killed in a riot, the widow can only keep their home if she takes his job. Eager to succeed, she shows more determination than is usual among the misogynist male police when a low-caste girl is reported missing and then turns up dead. A charismatic senior woman officer, Inspector Sharma, is duly drafted in to head the murder investigation, becoming Santosh’s mentor. Success for women, however, generally means showing they can bend the rules as flagrantly as the men, where survival always comes at huge personal cost. A fascinating police procedural, focusing on the relationships within the force rather than crimes or culprits, the film is an investigation into deep-rooted systemic corruption.