Images, given to the filmmaker from a distant Kurdistan, are stitched together: a Kurdistan in flux, observed through the eyes of a stranger. Incidental and mundane, the images are held up as objects of inquiry, challenging the gaze beyond numb and habitual ways of seeing. How to narrate these images with a devotion more potent than the gift itself, becomes the primary question of Images of a Favour.

Alex Murray: Can you describe the political events that were taking place at the time of this project? As I remember, Kurdish independence movements, both in Iraq and Syria, were growing in energy.

Kani Marouf: After the overwhelming results of the Kurdish Referendum on Independence were announced, Iraq reinstated an air blockade and all airports in the KRG were closed down. In a matter of days, the Iraqi army alongside Iranian-backed militias took over the city of the disputed area of Kirkuk, home to Shaho Abdulkadr. What I remember from this time is the lack of coverage such an historic moment should have deserved. Despite the frustration this caused, I had a sudden urgency to obtain footage from Kirkuk by any means possible. The conflicting relationship between the representation of Kurds in Western media and their constant invisibilization added to my urge of doing the film. It is a recurring topic of our suppression, like burning our books or destroying our cultural heritage or censoring our language. I'm trying to find slippery moments within being invisible while also analyzing the footage for consequences of this invisibilization.

AM: For me, it seems that your purpose in making this film was to decode the images that Shaho had been sending you. Tell me about the role you took on as the interpreter of these messages.

KM: The purpose was to investigate the role a filmmaker takes on as mediator between material and spectator. The challenge was to align the footage in a linear narrative without actually understanding why exactly the specific material was sent. The footage never allowed for a  decoding of any political message, as this would have been speculative, with my politics projecting onto his material. So my role is less one of decoding his messages but the way  of looking at the images he is sharing. To guard these images, you could say. I wanted to avoid falling into a trap of formulating a subjective political position, even though the political context of the material was the reason why the film even came about.

AM: Let’s discuss this transparency in your style of filmmaking. As the director, you clearly state where you stand in relation to the footage, where we stand as spectators, and how both director and spectator connect to the subject. It’s not a distance though – in fact, quite the opposite – there’s a sensitivity toward the material with this transparency.

KM: I was caught off guard by the beauty of the images. Finding a methodology that makes the spectator susceptible to the beauty of the images became the main task of the montage and construction of the narration. The narrator is replicating the spectator’s journey in watching the film, moving towards a sort of self-reflexivity in looking at the images. Shaho’s reality is somewhat exposed by himself, so the spectator and filmmaker, or at least this is what the work proposes, need to expose their relation to this fact. What they see and what is being constructed here is an image-reality. By exposing my own spectatorship, I try to show the audience’s own spectatorship, and with this, to foreground the reality that is represented in Shaho’s images.

I realize that the beauty of the images could be overlooked, as they signify especially to the Western gaze disaster, turmoil and war. So how not to become complicit in repurposing these tropes of violence projected onto the images for purposes of enhancing the thrill and suspense level? What helped in the construction of the narrative, was dealing with the images, as you would treat a gift.

The problem I find with documentary filmmaking is that typically a preconceived agenda dictates the filmmaker’s agency and therefore the film’s meaning. My methods were merely reactive. Having been freed from the task of  image production I was also freed in the process of montage and narration.

AM: In a world inundated with visual information, the image has all but lost its affect. Yet, it seems like you want to draw us closer to how we view these images in particular, and to make us think about our relationship to images in general.

KM: Our hyperrealist world has caused mass sedation of our minds, especially in places where image pollution is a constant. In the film, I propose that decoding images requires devotion - in other words,  reading images to the point of realizing that what I see in an image is not reality. It requires a lot to give images a proper read, not because we don’t know how to read an image, although there could be more education on this, but because of the omnipresence and aesthetic totality of images in our world is numbing us. At the beginning of the film, there is an acknowledgment of the absolute territorialization of earth. In “The Uncompressible, or: The Rediscovery of the Extended”, Peter Sloterdijk reflects on the correlation between media and travel in a global system, in which its inhabitants are pushed to constant mobility, stating that “the sticky omnipresence of the news has ensured that countless numbers experience the once-wide world as a dirty little ball.” I guess becoming reenchanted to any image would mean traveling to another planet, or opening your eyes to the already inhabited one.

AM: Coming back to the title, how did the gifting of these images influence your handling of the film? What were the motivations of Shaho to share these images with you?

KM: First of all, he was really doing me a favour. He sent me the images out of a favour,  it's not like a metaphorical title or something. And then what do you do when someone does you a favour? It's a gesture of friendship and respect, you're being respected in your request, so you respect the person, you are being thankful, and you don't want to misrepresent them. While at the same time looking beyond what you see and allowing for the beauty of the images to transcend the screen.

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