3 WOMEN AT WAR

« The women of Mount Ararat » are personified in this movie by three fighters : Zylan, Sorwin and Elif. This army of women gathers several generations who share different experiences in a unique fight to defend ideas, to defend their gender and obtain equality. Women’s participation in a war wears down gender barriers as much as it underlines them. These women fight for peace and an ideal of living that combines emancipation and autonomy. They took the arms to gain their peace.

These women have a contemporary resonance. They are making History. Who are they ?

Zylan, 20 years old, is from Germany. Her war name comes from a woman who blew her explosive belt among Turkish soldiers. Zylan is a strange fanatic, naive, a young girl who is not already a woman, who spends her spare time writing poetry, whose favourite words are « happiness » and « love ». She is the only one in this group not to have blood on her hands. This is probably why her own words ring true, despite the weapon she carries permanently.

Sorwin, 23 years old, is from Belfort in France. She dropped from school at 16 and landed in the guerilla right during a fratricidal fight with Irak’s Kurds. Her story is one of an immigrant’s daughter living in the French suburbs, who one day vanished. She is still marked by France, her school comrades, her teachers, but also by war, by the men she killed and by the shrapnel marks she bears on her skin.

Elif, 36 years old, is the eldest. She spent 10 years in a Turkish jail. She joined the guerilla aged 14, and she is a living memory for these women who rarely live after 30, as most of them have been killed in the 90s. Elif heads the squad. Always serious, always listening, she is a mother whose sole children are these women soldiers. She is a woman who has only known weapons. But she is, paradoxically, the most womanly of all of them.