Between Judgment and Emotion: Movies on War 2025
Parvana Guliyeva is an Azerbaijani documentary filmmaker and journalist based in Norway. She participated both as a filmmaker pitching her own project and as a member of the jury panel at Movies on War festival recently.
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The Movies on War festival offers a landscape of reflection – on journalism, displacement, memory, and the fragile borders between nations and the individuals who inhabit them.
I arrived in Elverum this November with a mixture of curiosity and quiet anxiety. Fifty projects had been submitted to the pitching competition and only ten had been selected for Movies on War 2025. When the email arrived confirming that The Light Behind the Wall, the film I am directing, was among the finalists, I had to reread it twice.
The film project was not conceived in a formal studio or development lab, but during my master’s research on conflict journalism. While conducting interviews in Oslo, I met Rabia Arrar – a Palestinian filmmaker and taxi driver – whose story unexpectedly opened a window into a hope I had not dared to articulate. That meeting planted the seed for the film. Months later, seeing the project listed among the top ten pitches felt both grounding and surreal.
The journey to Elverum became its own emotional landscape: Norway’s lakes, forests, and soft November mountains passed by like faint memories of Azerbaijan. It was a strange comfort – a reminder that even landscapes can carry echoes of home.
On the first day of the festival, rain fell steadily in Elverum, as if the weather itself were setting the tone for stories shaped by war and migration. The city, located in eastern Norway and home to around 21,000 people, is two and a half hours north of Oslo by bus. Known for its forests, rivers, and winter stillness, the town carries a quietness that invites reflection.
Yet despite the calm, one concern kept returning: Would most panels and screenings be held only in Norwegian, as often happens at film events here? My previous experience at the Trondheim Film Festival had taught me how difficult it is to follow films without subtitles. Fortunately, Movies on War was more accessible than expected. Pitching in English still made me self-conscious, but it reinforced something essential: clarity of vision matters more than language.
Serving as a jury member for the short film competition, I watched several works that left a strong and lasting impression. The jury’s prize for Best Film went to Aktionen by Einar Bredefeldt, and we decided to give an Honourable Mention to African Family Dinner by Ibrahim Mursal.
But in this essay, I would like to speak instead about the films that did not receive awards – the ones that were not selected, yet captured my attention most deeply. One of these is Adel Khan Farooq’s film, which is called Tøyen Pop-up, and stood out immediately: a dialogue-driven portrait of people in Norway with diverse migration backgrounds. The structure demanded patience, but the emotional reward was undeniable.
Another film I found remarkable was Anders Hammer’s film, Frontline. The official synopsis describes the film this way: «Muhammad leaves his wife and children in Oslo to fight Russia. Filmmaker Anders Hammer follows him, his brothers-in-arms, and the Ukrainians they fight for.» But for me, the film unfolded not as a frontline portrait, but as the quiet journey of a Norwegian journalist documenting the lives of three individuals in Ukraine.
At first, the interview-driven structure seemed conventional, almost predictable. Yet slowly the film shifted into an observational mode – calm, patient, and deeply attentive – and that shift changed everything. It reminded me of a truth I often try to forget: wherever we go, the war, traumas inside us travel with us.
The Endless Carpet, Dutch filmmaker Simone Hooymans’ experimental animated film, reminded me of the chaotic, dreamlike visions I used to have after the war. Bees, viruses, and shifting landscapes are woven into one continuous pattern, suggesting that even with good intentions, humanity may still be drifting toward its own destruction.
Watching these stories unfold, I was reminded once again that personal and collective pain are inseparable. When someone’s homeland falls into tragedy, their life story becomes woven into that history. War is never just a backdrop – it seeps into identity, movement, silence, and dreams.
Before and after the pitching session, festival director Øystein Egge reminded me several times: «Parvana, will you come to the screening of Do You Love Me. Do you know how beautiful this film is?” I told him the title sounded interesting – that I had heard a song with the same name somewhere before. I found myself pointing toward the cinema hall and asking a volunteer, «Do you love me?» The question was spontaneous, a mix of curiosity and a kind of nervous excitement that comes only at festivals when hearts are already open.
Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me is constructed entirely from archival footage, transforming Lebanon’s audiovisual history into a personal and reflective narrative. On screen, the narrative discussed war through archival materials, photos, and cameras in Lebanon. Watching it there – rain tapping faintly on windows, the crowd leaning in, the simple question bouncing back in laughter and in gentle confusion – felt like cinema at its most generative: shared vulnerability, inviting an interesting interpretation.
Among the films screened this year, one that stayed with me long after the lights came up was The Helsinki Effect, directed by Arthur Franck, produced by Indie Film. The film reconstructs political conversations from the Cold War era, mixing archival voices with AI-restored audio. Hearing Brezhnev’s voice – so familiar in tone, reconstructed with uncanny precision—unexpectedly transported me to my childhood.
In our village, people used to compare men with thick, awkward-looking eyebrows to Brezhnev’s famous brows. My grandmother used to joke about a man in our village whose thick eyebrows reminded everyone of Brezhnev’s. The moment his face appeared on screen, that memory surfaced with a sharpness I did not anticipate.
Another figure in the film – Süleyman Demirel, who was the prime minister of Turkey seven times between 1965 and 1993 and then as the president of Turkiye from 1993 to 2000 – pulled me even deeper into the past. I remember him vividly from his 1996 visit to Azerbaijan. We were living in a displacement settlement near the Iranian border after the First Karabakh War between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
My parents watched state television obsessively, clinging to every promise that suggested we might one day return home. Demirel’s words echo even now: «Next year, the whole Azerbaijani IDPs will return to Karabakh.» My parents believed him and celebrated this joyfully. They carried hope the way displaced people always do – clutching it tightly because they have nothing else to hold. But it didn’t happen. My father died after years of waiting for this news.
Watching The Helsinki Effect, I realised how political memory is never just historical. It is domestic. Intimate. It lives in kitchens, in small rooms without heating, in refugee camps made of mud bricks, in the whispers of those who survived collectivisation. My grandmother often told us about Stalin’s death – how women in the village wailed, beat their knees, and collapsed under the weight of propaganda. Those images resurfaced as I watched the film: the tears of exhausted peasant women, the shadow of repression, the silence left behind.
Many of the films touched similar nerves. I met people whose stories expanded the festival beyond cinema. Polina, who fled Belarus and now lives in Lithuania, carried a quiet heaviness when she spoke about exile. Our conversation turned quickly into friendship. Others came into my life almost accidentally, like the older Norwegian couple who asked to take a selfie with me and my Chinese colleague after learning I was a jury member. Their excitement was disarming – an ordinary moment that somehow encapsulated why I feel drawn to Norway. Not because it is perfect, but because it holds space for strangers.
But no film shook me as deeply as The Voice of Hind Rajab. As I watched the film, one question kept echoing inside me: What does it mean to be helpless? I know too well the feeling of being unable to help someone you love, or someone who needs you. And the kind of helplessness that war imposes – that suffocating, paralysing helplessness – is something I unfortunately understand all too deeply. Her final hours, trapped among the wounded and the dead, replayed with unbearable clarity.
As a media worker, I had followed her story when it first spread through social networks; her voice haunted me for days. The film reconstructed those events with devastating precision – the rescuers, the frantic phone calls, the suffocating tension in a single room. Even weeks later, I cannot detach myself from the experience. It reopened questions I have carried since childhood, growing up in war: Why do borders exist? Why do children suffer from conflicts they never chose? Why is humanity carved into countries, colours, and categories?
Clinging to hope in the midst of helplessness – Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, about the young Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, captures that feeling with painful accuracy. But I admit that I couldn’t watch the film to the end. After days of confronting war-soaked films and stories heavy with grief, something inside me felt hollow, scraped out.
The film builds itself on interrupted phone calls, on the portrait of lives stopped halfway. Just as war cuts a future in two, the narrative carries that same unfinished, suspended feeling.
After the screening, I visited an exhibition with Hassouna’s pictures. She had hoped for the war to end – but did not live long enough to see it. I walked alone through the silent room. Her photographs held a sorrow that wrapped itself around me. And as I stood there, they carried me back to my own sister, who died in the conditions of war long before she had a chance to grow.
Every encounter, every screening, every conversation with filmmakers and jurors during the festival reinforced the same understanding: We do not simply document conflict; conflict documents us.