Kurdwin Ayub fled to Austria from Iraq with her family in 1991. Nearly 25 years later, she accompanies her father on his trip back to their former homeland. While her father contemplates returning to Iraq for good, Kurdwin and her cousins feel like strangers there. An intimate, occasionally quirky, sobering portrayal of different generations that deals with the experience of being rooted, and also with uprooting.

»I don’t want to write about the war that is present in the film, nor about the odd relationship with my father that you see. I don’t write about the last hopes that remain for a nation, nor about broken-down relationships between father and daughter where they get brought back together again. I definitely don’t want to remember about how we had to turn down the meal cooked by soldiers themselves, or the iron smell of their hands, what bombs going off sounded like, and the mobile phones there, which all had the same ring tone. But whatever, I’m not writing about these things. I wanted to talk about how fascinated I am that the film has turned out to be so funny, even though I was so sad at the time of making it. The fact that it’s my first full-length film. The work involved in it. Maintaining a mix of expectations, hopes and a broken heart. And on top of that, I always thought it would be difficult in a war zone, but it was actually difficult to keep coming back from it. The differences between the cultures and mentality were too vast. The West and the young art world in which a young film-maker moves drown themselves in booze. The Middle East was far more real, despite the fact that everything seems to have just stood still. And I’m grateful for all these experiences. And it was also okay to be sad. I was the one who pushed myself into dealing with a difficult topic and into hard work. I had to grow up somehow, after all.«
– Kurdwin Ayub

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Awards for ›Paradies! Paradies!‹
Carte Blanche – Nachwuchspreis des Landes NRW – Duisburger Filmwoche 2016 | Beste Bildgestaltung Dokumentarfilm – Diagonale 2016 | New Waves Non Fiction Award – Sevilla Festival de Cine Europeo 2016