Screening at Venice: Halkawt Mustafa’s ‘No Paradise If You Are Killed By a Woman’

A war film with a flimsy dramatic foundation, Halkawt Mustafa’s No Paradise If You Are Killed By a Woman is nonetheless evocative of real desolation. Following a Kurdish female sniper battling ISIS in Mosul—based on a real woman Mustafa met in 2014—the Venice Film Festival title (and Iraqi Oscar entry) boasts remarkable visual detail, in part because it was filmed on location in Mosul.

However, this realistic backdrop is forced to contend with a lack of narrative inquiry into its heroine’s life and moral fiber. She seems to face ethical dilemmas at every turn, yet they’re seldom dramatized as such, resulting in a work that inadvertently skips past its most interesting ideas.

It opens with a slow and absorbing warzone sequence set in 2016. Vyan (Avan Jamal), a woman feared and mythologized as “the Kurdish sniper,” sneaks into a makeshift ISIS stronghold and rescues a child bride being held prisoner by a militant—who she readily kills with a single, clean headshot. It rings out triumphantly amid the ruins. Before she bids the girl farewell, Vyan holds up a picture of her younger sister, who’s being similarly held captive, and whose trail she’s been chasing for some time.

As motivations go, Vyan’s is simple and clear cut, though it takes a while for us to return to this pressing plot. Back at the Kurdish Peshmerga base, Vyan is revered for her marksmanship by men and women alike—she’s even a sentimental favorite of her elderly commander (Kader Jalal) and she stands out for her outgoing poise and long, flowing hair. Her distinctions from the other, numerous women fighters eventually are explained when we learn more about her background. But in the meantime, as she protects her comrades from oncoming attacks, the movie takes on a breakneck pace, allowing us to delight in Vyan’s clockwork proficiency. She lays down her enormous rifle, takes careful aim through its scope, stoically pulls the trigger and hits her target.

Aim. Fire. Hit. Repeat. It’s a captivating rhythm of violence, one we’re allowed to luxuriate in with the knowledge of her targets’ crimes. However, this is soon cut short by a plot detour which forces her to return home to Norway, where she’s lived since the age of 12 (hence the apparent cultural divide). The legal complications of fighting in a foreign army, while being made a target of ISIS—thus endangering other Norwegians—takes up a good chunk of the second act, as Vyan is counseled and questioned by a social worker adept at dealing with war trauma (Thorbjørn Harr).

These scenes are broken up by flashbacks which detail how she and her sister were kidnapped while visiting Iraqi Kurdistan, where their parents were also executed. This left Vyan with a single-minded mission. Once she finally returns to Mosul, the movie gradually resumes its strategic unspooling, as its angel of vengeance draws closer to a mysterious Swedish ISIS sniper holding her sister hostage. This buildup is in turn peppered with Vyan reading poetry about the strength of women and the weakness of her male enemies. This brings the evocative title into focus, turning the film into a pop-feminist rebellion, tilt shifted from its arguably outdated fist-pumping, girl-bossing Western modes to suit a wildly different, thoroughly urgent cultural context.

That the whole thing is skin deep, like an upbeat fight song gesturing at complexity, is both a feature and a bug. While the chess game between the two marksmen plays out on an enormous scale—they scope each other out from buildings miles apart, with civilians in between—the subsequent ethical quandaries are brushed over. The movie’s chilling sound design ensures each bullet fired by Vyan’s ISIS rivals feels like a death knell, and as she gets closer to her targets, vulnerable civilians hang in the balance. However, Vyan’s focus on her mission (with her commander in her ear, guiding her from afar) is framed in a limiting way.

There’s almost never a moment where she hesitates, or pauses to consider the weight of each life lost, each time she delays pulling the trigger—often to get a better shot herself, or to observe more clues about where the Swedish sniper is hiding. Numerous people die on her watch, and it doesn’t seem to affect her. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong from this side of the screen, but given how Jamal plays with subdued ferocity in other moments, this misstep is likely not her fault, and feels more like a product of mismatched reaction shots which don’t unearth any lingering uncertainty.

Before long, No Paradise If You Are Killed By a Woman develops into a sprawling series of trolley problems that have little interest in engaging with the dilemma at hand—that is, if the film is even aware of these implications to begin with. Much of its emotional weight is geared towards verbal repetitions about Vyan’s trauma, but this ends up confronted largely in the abstract. It’s an idea for the film to work towards as its heroine desperately crawls through muck and debris, towards a man she hopes to righteously kill. But the closer she gets to her goal, the more she ends up leaving this emotional undercurrent behind, kneecapping even the broad sentimentality in which Mustafa seems to trade.

That the director dedicates this tale of resilience to his daughters is a commendable gesture, especially as the story is fashioned after his own, as an Iraqi Kurd who fled to Norway. However, the movie’s personal impetus doesn’t make up for its shortcomings, or its failures to express the rigors of its moral dilemmas. It’s one of the most immaculately designed war films you’re likely to see this year, with an enveloping use of environment and atmosphere. But when it comes to filling that space with dynamic drama, sadly, it misses its mark.

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