Bad Hunter aims at Oscar award for Kurdish filmmaker

By Ava Homa

LOS ANGELES - Although he is the only Kurdish filmmaker ever shortlisted twice for best live action short film at the Oscars, 35-year-old Sahim Omar Kalifa remains unpretentious and gracious.

With a shy smile, he speaks on his iPad from a hotel room in Qatar, where his film is being shown at a festival. This is the second time his work has been shortlisted for the Oscars Short Films award – quite an achievement for a director with only three films under his belt.

“Bad Hunter” was selected for the Oscars from among 144 live-action shorts.

The film has already won several awards – at festivals in Montreal, Valladolid, Dubai, Australia, Los Angeles, London, New York and San Francisco.

The Belgian government and the Kurdistan Region’s ministry of culture funded “Bad Hunter,” which was produced by Belgian production company A Private View.

The film was shot in the scenic Zakho area of northern Iraq, and recorded in Kurdish.

It tells the story of Bahoz, a young man who does some hunting in the nearby valleys, both as a pastime and to feed his family.

“Bahoz is not happy about hunting animals. He just can’t think of anything better to do. He is a young man who needs to grow up, to become an adult,” said Kalifa, who wrote the screenplay with Belgian scriptwriter Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem.

One day, Bahoz stumbles across an older man raping a young woman in a remote valley. The traumatized woman not only has to deal with the physical and psychological scars of her assault, she needs to make sure her family will never know what happened.

“Women in our society who become victims of rape are doubly victimized by their families,” the filmmaker said: If they physically survive a rape, the women won’t know how to survive the anger of a family who will want to regain their lost honor.

But in the movie, the woman finds an excellent solution to her problem: her ingenuity creates a twist to the story that surprises and pleases the audience.

In 2013, Kalifa directed “Baghdad Messi,” which was shortlisted for the Academy Awards last year and won 60 prizes.

It is the story of a 10-year-old boy who is obsessed with football and star player Messi, the Argentina-born footballer who plays for the Barcelona Football Club.

The boy in the film dreams about becoming a star and meeting his hero. But the kid has lost a leg in the Iraq war, a misfortune that directly affects his ability to do what he loves most.

When the day the young boy has been anxiously expecting finally arrives – the Champions League final between Barcelona and Manchester United -- his television breaks down.
This leads to a surprise.

“Baghdad Messi” was another success that won numerous prizes and was invited to about 150 festivals. “Land of the Heroes,” Kalifa’s first film, was produced in 2011 and was also a festival darling.
But Kalifa was not born into movie making and success.

During his childhood in Zakho, taking photos and recording films was a luxury beyond the reach of the average person.

“I had good parents and I was finally able to convince my father to buy me a camera that I could work with and make some money,” he said.

When in 2001 Kalifa went to Belgium, he wasn’t sure what to do with his life.

“I told a few people I knew that I liked films and they said I could try to get into a good film school in Brussels,” he recalled.

In 2008, Kalifa received his master’s degree in film making in Belgium. But that was no guarantee of success for a lower-middle-class immigrant.

“I had no money to make films with but I was lucky enough that my graduation film NAN won a Wild Card competition from the Flemish Film Fund in Belgium. I wasn’t allowed to spend the award money on a car or a house and had to make another short film with that money,” he recounted.

Kalifa never predicted that any of his shorts would get this much attention: “But this year I really hope I can make it to the final nomination,” he said, as he eagerly waits for his ‘Bad Hunter’ to hit the mark at the Oscars.