Shown at the recent Berlin International Film Festival, Dreams’ Gate is a briskly paced documentary about the YPJ, an all-female militia in Syrian Kurdistan fighting against ISIS and other forces. Director Negin Ahmadi embeds herself with the fighters and maybe out of necessity at times centers the story around herself as well. Sometimes the soldiers don’t want to be filmed for the safety of their own families and sometimes Ahmadi is simply not allowed to shoot at all.
She is able to capture many tender human moments amongst the chaos, including a soldier refusing to be videoed, except this time it’s because she’s too embarrassed to dance in front of the camera. Instead Ahmadi ingeniously captures her shadow against a wall doing the dance. Another scene shows the soldiers taking time to braid each other’s often waist length hair. In a small office, Ahmadi films a soldier who won’t show her face from the neck down. So we see just that long hair flowing down her green fatigues. It reminded me of looking up at my mom when I was a toddler, only seeing her long black hair.
The potential for marriage and motherhood to derail their military careers is one of the many societal issues the soldiers face because they are women. Even though they put themselves at just as much risk as the male soldiers, they operate under different rules. A female commandant tells Ahmadi that marriage would mean the end for a female soldier but not for a man. According to her, a man goes home for a week, gets married, comes back to the front. A woman geting married means she could get pregnant and would be done as a fighter.
For many of them, it seems like fighting is an escape from the lack of freedom they had in their peacetime lives. While visiting a town where ISIS has passed through, the soldiers try to recruit a young woman working in her family’s kitchen. They compliment her cleanliness then tell her life would be better with them than it is at home. She smiles and seems open to the idea but says her parents would kill her if she joined.
Ahmadi shows her own life at the beginning of the film before we meet any of the militia members. We see family footage of her as a young child then her wedding in her early 20s. She tells us in voiceover that she and her husband were too different as people so the marriage didn’t last. A feeling occasionally grows that this experience is like an adventure for her. She wonders near the end of the film about her friends back home just leading their normal lives while she’s surrounded by violence. A kind of ‘If they could see me now’ sentiment. We see her practicing shooting a gun on a riverbank. Will she crossover from documentarian to combatant? No, that line is never crossed. But she identifies strongly with them escaping the patriarchal restraints of life back home, wherever that home may be.
Like the war there is a mixture of things happening impossibly quickly and then waiting seemingly forever. Ahmadi captures things at a blink and you’ll miss it pace, and then is forced to sit and contemplate herself at times when she’s allowed to film nothing but her own face. She moves fearlessly through war zones, sticking her camera around corners and into the backs of trucks where people stare back at her or shield their faces from her. She also takes the time to watch the militia fighters lightheartedly put some potential new recruits through combat exercises in muddy puddles. The new women at first resist getting their civilian clothes dirty but soon enough they’re laughing as they roll around in the mud and rain. The film ends though with on-screen text telling what has become of the fighters featured in the film.
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