Kurdish director Mano Khalil wraps shooting on new film 'Moments'

Kurdish Director Mano Khalil completes filming his new movie Moments

Director Mano Khalil, a Syrian filmmaker of Kurdish origin with Swiss citizenship, has completed the filming of his feature motion picture Moments, which was shot in Switzerland.

The film is produced by Frame Film for cinema and television and features a diverse ensemble cast that includes international, Swiss, Kurdish, and Arab actors.

Among them are the Swiss actress and stage and screen icon Heidi Maria Glössner, the actress Sabina Timoteo, as well as Syrian Kurdish and Arab actors such as Shirwan Haji and Jalal Al-Tawil, along with the Kurdish actors Ismail Zagros and Salar Salem and many additional talented performers.

The film represents the conclusion of a trilogy that Khalil began in his earlier works. The first film, The Swallow, examined the period of youth through the children’s search for their roots as they matured.

The second film, Neighbours, explored childhood from the perspective of a Kurdish child who experienced life under Syrian Baathist fascism.

Khalil now completes the trilogy with Moments, which presents three interwoven narratives that address human adulthood and engage with themes of belonging, ethics, wisdom, and emotional experience.

Inspired by true events, Moments presents a social drama centered on the Syrian surgeon Waheed, played by Jalal Al-Tawil. During the era of the former regime, he is forced to flee to Switzerland because he provided secret medical treatment to the wounded.

He leaves behind his wife and two daughters and lives as a refugee in Switzerland while searching for them until the fall and escape of the Syrian Baathist dictator. Waheed’s narrative intersects with that of Monica, portrayed by Sabina Timoteo, a case officer in the asylum system who becomes deeply affected by the emotional weight of refugees’ stories.

Actress Sabine Timoteo in a scene from Moments, directed by Mano Khalil, 2025. Photo: Frame Film/Handout to iKurd.net

The final storyline follows Samo, played by Ismail Zagros, a fast-food restaurant owner who becomes entangled in unforeseen complications caused by his greedy neighbor.

The film ultimately forms a unified narrative concerned with displacement and loss and seeks to address three fundamental questions in Aristotle’s philosophy of human existence: ethics, emotion, and reason.

Moments conveys a narrative rich in emotional depth yet distinguished by subtle humor. It demonstrates how unexpected encounters provide the characters with moments of courage and openness and allow new paths to emerge within their lives.

The film was shot in the Swiss city of Bern and employs multiple languages, including German, Kurdish, Arabic, French, and Turkish. It will be prepared for film festivals and theatrical release following the completion of post-production.

Mano Khalil is a Kurdish director who studied cinema in former Czechoslovakia. He worked for a period in Czechoslovak Television and, upon returning to Syria, produced a film about Baathist practices in the Kurdish Jazira region and the fascist indoctrination imposed on schoolchildren by the Baath regime.

This film, titled Where God Sleeps, was completed in 1992. Khalil later migrated to Switzerland, where he currently resides and works as a director and producer of narrative and documentary films for cinema and television.

His internationally recognized films include Garden of Eden, The Taste of Honey (The Beekeeper), The Swallow, and his recent film Neighbours, which received more than seventy international awards, was screened at more than 250 film festivals, and was distributed in more than thirty countries.

Director Mano Khalil (center), a Syrian-Kurdish filmmaker with Swiss citizenship, on set with his team during the filming of Moments (2025). Photo: Handout to iKurd.net

Neighbours is regarded as the first film set during the Baath and Assad era to be made in the Kurdish language and features Kurdish actors alongside Arab actors such as Jalal Al-Tawil, Jay Abdo, Mazen Al-Natour, and Nasima Al-Daher.

Mano Khalil’s new film Moments represents an important example of how a Kurdish director of Syrian origin can engage with an Arab subject in a manner distinct from Arab filmmakers working in the Syrian cinematic field, who have not previously addressed Kurdish issues in their work.

The film demonstrates Khalil’s ability to build cultural bridges and illuminate stories from a humane perspective that transcends the ethnic and sectarian divisions instilled by the former regime, divisions whose effects unfortunately remain visible in Syrian society today.