Zaynê Akyol

Zaynê Akyol — Biography

Zaynê Akyol was born in 1987 in a village in Turkey to Kurdish parents. When she was four, her family moved to Canada, and she grew up in Montreal. She studied first at Cégep Montmorency and then began a bachelor's degree at the University of Montreal, but found the programme too theoretical and transferred to the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She graduated with a bachelor's in communication in 2010 and a master's in communication with a film concentration in 2014.

Her 31-minute documentary Under Two Skies, made in her final undergraduate year, was shown at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, screened in Cannes through the Short Film Corner, and won the Documentary-Young Creators Programming Audience Award.

She became widely known for the feature documentary Gulîstan, Land of Roses (2016), supported by Canada's National Film Board (NFB) and MitosFilm in Germany. The film follows her search for Gulîstan, a Kurdish woman born in the same village who had looked after her in childhood; to make it, she travelled into the hills of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and lived alongside a unit of female fighters. Photographs taken during the shoot became an exhibition, Rojekê, One Day. For Rojek (2022) she received a Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs.