At the end of writer and director Halkawt Mustafa’s propulsive war thriller No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman, Vyan (Avan Jamal), the Kurdish sniper whose harrowing journey to save her sister forms the backbone of the film, states that “Only when we face death do we understand the value of life.” It’s an overly blunt vocalization of the narrative’s central thesis, and the sparse amount of dialogue throughout Mustafa’s film isn’t really its strong suit. But the feelings that line speaks to ring true enough in the driven performances that lend increasingly deeper shades of humanity to characters who are used to suppressing their emotions to survive.
That’s exactly what Vyan— who we first glimpse creeping through a combat zone in a tense and lengthy tracking shot— does. Alongside other female soldiers (this film is a sneakily neat subversion of typically male-led war movies), she’s evidently resourceful, placing duty before fear. Rifle in hand, she plunges into the front lines to eliminate an approaching armored car bomb before it kills her entire regiment. Her hardened exterior is not unfounded; a flashback reveals how in the 2014 invasion of Mosul by Islamic State forces, her parents were killed and her and her sister sold as sex slaves at an auction. The scene is straightforward and brief, but nonetheless terrifying, the women huddled together in a cage as men pass and ask their age (at 24, Vyan is deemed “too old”) and for them to lift their niqabs for inspection. Vyan is sold to a man who physically abuses her (Mustafa wisely keeps the action off-screen, painting a picture with sound instead), and, bloody and shaking, picks up a gun, shoots him dead, and makes her escape.
It’s to Norway that Vyan ultimately emigrates, making this a doubly personal third feature for Mustafa, who worked as a war photographer during that 2014 invasion that found female citizens particularly held at the mercy of IS soldiers, who himself left his home in Iraqi Kurdistan for Norway as a child, and who dedicates this movie to his daughters. And it’s to Norway that she returns after the car bombing incident, where she learns that her sister— long since believed dead— may still be alive in Mosul, married against her will. Thought to be a potential threat to Norwegian citizens due to a bounty placed on her head thanks to her remarkably high kill count and faced with the option of either prosecution or exile under a new identity by a government official (Thorbjorn Harr), Vyan returns to Mosul to track down and save her sister.
No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman— which has been announced as Iraq’s entry to the 99th Academy Awards— exists in a bit of a grey area, not particularly action-forward enough to enthrall genre fans, nor cerebral enough to qualify as a particularly incisive drama. Nonetheless, it aptly portrays the patience Vyan’s work requires. The long stretches of waiting, watching, and listening (often to radio comms that, as they track families and women with children entering specific zones, are horrifying in their own right) create an aura of anticipation and dread in and of themselves, and when Vyan moves, the camera usually moves with her. Largely shot on location in Mosul, cinematographer John Erling H. Frediksen smoothly navigates the derelict landscape as his camera tracks Vyan, who— much like the stereotypical action hero— becomes increasingly bloodied and battered the further she progresses in her mission. There’s little that’s stereotypical about the film’s denouement, however, which is neither flashy nor explosive nor wholly triumphant. If you can stomach the overt preachiness of its messaging, the sentiment that No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman drives home— that trauma does not define a person, that it is never too late to live the life you desire and deserve— serves as an affectionate tribute to all the women, both civilian and soldier, whose lives were irrevocably upended by war.
No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman had its world premiere out of competition at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. Runtime: 110 minutes.
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