WRITING HAWA by Najiba and Rasul Noori has won the kinokino Audience Award at DOK.fest München, sponsored by Bayerischer Rundfunk and 3sat. The 2,000-euro award will be awarded tomorrow evening at 7:30 pm at the DOK.fest's awards ceremony in the Amerikahaus. The VIKTORIAs, the awards of the three main competitions, will also be awarded here. WRITING HAWA will be screened afterwards. Tickets are available at dokfest-muenchen.de.
The content of WRITING HAWA: The film portrays three generations of Afghan women, combined with impressive images of a country at a crossroads. Hawa, the filmmaker's mother, was forced to marry as a teenager. In her mid-50s, she starts a business selling handmade clothes and finally learns to read and write. Najiba, her daughter and the filmmaker, grew up emancipated, largely thanks to her mother. Zahra, the filmmaker's 14-year-old niece, is thrown out of her father's house and taken in by Hawa. However, the Taliban would then take over Kabul. “I had five minutes to make a decision,“ says Najiba, who finished making the film while in exile in France.
Najiba Noori is an author and director who has written reports for the Huffington Post, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and UN Women, among others. She participated in the IDFA Academy in 2022. Following the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan, she relocated to France in 2021. WRITING HAWA is her debut feature-length documentary. After Najiba Noori fled from the Taliban, her brother and co-director Rasul Noori took over the camera work.
After each screening at DOK.fest München 2025, viewers could vote for their favourite film using a QR code. The kinokino Audience Award is organised and sponsored by kinokino, the film magazine of Bayerischer Rundfunk and 3sat.
