Ziad Kalthoum

Ziad Kalthoum is a Syrian filmmaker who started filming his first medium length movie (Oh My Heart) in 2009, about a story of a group of Kurdish women who lived in a village without men for political and social reasons. The film was banned from the screening in Syria because it is not allowed to talk about Kurdish society. It was considered as the first film to speak about the Kurds of Syria. In 2012 he began filming his feature film The Immortal Sergeant when he was a soldier in compulsory military service at the same time of the outbreak of the Syrian revolution. The film premiered at Locarno Film Festival, and he won the Best Film Award at the BBC Arabic Film Festival. In 2013, after defecting from the Syrian army and refusing to fight against his own people, he fled to Beirut and began filming Taste of Cement that won the Best Film Award at the Visions du réel 2017, has been nominated for the Best European Film Award and won Doc Alliance Selection Award 2017.