Imphal, Dec 7 (UNI) Film critic Meghachandra Kongbam has been appointed as a member of the FIPRESCI International Jury at the 12th Duhok International Film Festival 2025, scheduled to take place from December 9-16 in Duhok, located in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq.
He departed Imphal today to attend the event.
Kongbam will serve on the three-member international panel alongside Olivia Popp from Germany and Dr. Kovan Hussein Saado from Kurdistan. The jury will select the winner of the International Critics’ FIPRESCI Prize, one of the festival’s most prestigious honours.
The Duhok International Film Festival, regarded as a major cinematic platform in the Middle East, annually presents films from across the globe, with a strong focus on Kurdish culture, language, identity and sociopolitical realities. The festival promotes a humanistic message centred on using cinema to cultivate a world free from violence, war and suffering.
Speaking ahead of his assignment, Meghachandra Kongbam expressed enthusiasm about the opportunity. He said his long-standing interest in political cinema aligns with the festival’s theme and added that he looks forward to understanding more deeply the lived experiences of the stateless Kurdish people, their cultural richness and the injustices they have endured across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Festival authorities, reflecting on the region’s cinematic history, remarked that years of conflict delayed the growth of Kurdish cinema but that the medium has now become an essential tool for expressing collective identity, resilience and the Kurdish struggle for dignity.
Olivia Popp, one of the co-jurors, is a film writer, critic and programmer currently completing her MA in Global Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. She writes primarily for Cineuropa and serves as publication coordinator for the GoCritic! emerging film critics workshop. She also works with the International Film Festival Rotterdam and programmes for the One World Slovakia Documentary Film Festival.
Dr. Kovan Hussein, the other jury member, has over two decades of experience in media as a producer, editor, presenter and film critic. A lecturer at the University of Silêmanî since 2014, he teaches film theory, visual culture and media genres, with research interests spanning media representation, Kurdish discourse and cross-cultural film reception.
Meghachandra Kongbam, based in Imphal and Delhi, is a noted film critic, academician and activist. Recipient of the Golden Lotus Award for Best Film Critic at the 63rd National Film Awards in 2015, he has been writing on cinema for four decades. He holds a postgraduate degree in Journalism from Banaras Hindu University and is an alumnus of the film appreciation course at FTII Pune. An Executive Member of FIPRESCI India and President of the Film Society of Manipur, he has served on numerous international film festival juries. His book Manipuri Cinema was published in 2021.
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