Autonomous film culture: Film and the Rojava Revolution, 2015–2025

Films have often been linked to revolutionary movements and ideals. Yet, there is little cultural analysis on how this deep engagement works in practice and how film culture is concretely embedded in revolutionary political projects. This paper fills that gap by discussing the Rojava Revolution and the quasi-autonomous region of North-Eastern Syria between 2015 and 2025. It concentrates on the Rojava Film Commune and its attempts to put the anti-capitalist, ecological and feminist revolutionary ideals of the Rojava Revolution into practice through an autonomous film production, a specific regime of filmic representations and international distribution. Based on this complex case, I propose the notion of autonomous film culture to grasp multiple dimensions and ambivalences of revolutionary film culture.