Baghdad, Iraq. In winter 2006, three years after the U.S.-led invasion, sectarian violence is extreme, against a backdrop of night-time curfews and the country’s occupation. You never know what you will see when you walk out your front door in the morning. Sara is a single mother and novelist, living with a shock that has plunged her into silence. She and her neighbors give us a glance into their daily lives, as they struggle to withstand their world breaking up as they attempt to breathe new life into a fragile sense of hope and faith in a better future.

Our River... Our Sky (titled Kulshi Mako in Arabic) is a web of interwoven stories that depicts a collective drama in a war-torn country whose deep scars take on regional dimensions. It is also the first internationally co-produced narrative feature film written and directed by an Iraqi-born filmmaker: London-based film producer, director and editor Maysoon Pachachi. Co-written with Irada Al-Jubori, a Baghdad-based fiction writer, the film offers a true insider’s vantage point on contemporary Iraqi narrative. In 2012, the screenplay won the $100,000 IWC Schaffhausen Gulf Filmmaker Award at the Dubai International Film Festival, which was awarded to the film’s director by the head of the jury, Cate Blanchett.

Maysoon Pachachi is an Iraqi-born filmmaker based in London. She received her education in Iraq, the United States and the United Kingdom. She then studied Philosophy at University College London and later studied Film at the London Film School. For many years, she was a documentary and fiction editor in the UK, and since 1994, she has worked as a freelance documentary filmmaker, mostly making films in and about the Middle East. Maysoon has also taught film directing and editing in Britain and Palestine (in Jerusalem, Gaza and at Birzeit University). In 2004, along with fellow Iraqi filmmaker Kasim Abid, she co-founded INDEPENDENT FILM & TELEVISION COLLEGE, a free film training center in Baghdad, whose students produced 17 short films shown at international festivals and screenings, as well as being seen within Iraq through a traveling film festival.