Rome-based sales company True Colours has picked up worldwide rights to Halkawt Mustafa's drama No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman, ahead of its world premiere at the 83rd Venice Film Festival in September. The film will screen Out of Competition — a programme reserved for ambitious, often genre-spanning work that sits outside the main competition (Deadline).

Avan Jamal stars as a female Peshmerga sniper who travels to Mosul to rescue her younger sister from ISIS. The cast also features Thorbjørn Harr, Kanar Sarchl, and Kader Jalal. Mustafa, a Norwegian-Kurdish director, wrote, directed, and produced the film, drawing on years of conversations with real Kurdish women who fought ISIS (Deadline).

This is territory Mustafa knows well. His 2015 documentary The Women ISIS Fears centred on female Kurdish fighters, and he returned to the subject with a feature lens. His other credits include The Classic, Iraq's submission for the foreign-language Oscar in 2016, and the documentary Hiding Saddam Hussein, about the farmer who concealed the Iraqi dictator for 235 days in 2003.

Mustafa produced the new film alongside Janne Hjeltnes and John M. Jacobsen for Norway's Hene Films, with co-producers The Chimney Pot (Sweden) and La Media (Iraq). The Biennale's official programme lists Norway and Iraq among the production countries (labiennale.org).

Fabio Tucci, True Colours' Head of Acquisitions, described the film as portraying "the Kurdish people's struggle through the eyes of a heroic female fighter" (Deadline). In the film business, a sales company acts as the bridge between a finished film and the distributors who license it for individual territories — meaning True Colours will now pitch the title to buyers across global markets.

For Mustafa, the Venice selection caps a career arc that has moved between documentary and fiction, and between Kurdish, Iraqi, and Nordic production frameworks. For audiences, it means a war story told from a vantage point the festival circuit rarely foregrounds: women soldiers on the front lines against ISIS, brought to the Lido by a film-maker who has spent a decade listening to them.

The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs in September 2026.