خاکی خەیاڵکراو Imagined Land Axê Xeyal Kirǐ

Imagined Land faces the intimate contours of mass death—operations of power that produce large-scale human killing alongside systematic destruction of ecological life—honoring two social constellations through which communities contest regimes and sustain empathy for all beings: 1) Dadkhahi, the Farsi name for collective practices of demanding accountability for those executed, disappeared, and silenced; and 2) Jingeh Parizi, the Kurdish name for environmentalism, meaning “caring for and protecting what holds life," referring to a nexus of organizers and rituals devoted to the defense, repair, and revival of Kurdistan’s wounded ecologies. خاکی خەیاڵکراو corroborates Dadkhahi and Jingeh Parizi as two interconnected wings of a shared orientation toward liberating life and redeeming the past.

After two years of conversation, image-making, writing, and research, we directed and filmed Axê Xeyal Kirǐ Imagined Land خاکی خەیاڵکراو (Oak’s Night), a forum and procession for land’s future, on October 13–14, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. The multilingual forum at the Canadian Kurdish Community Centre (CKCC) foregrounded struggles of oppressed communities within the ecological landscape of the Zagros Mountains, bringing Nastaran’s family memory and forest defenders’ labor into dialogue with Kurdish and Iranian workers, refugees, political leaders, and intellectuals exiled in diaspora.

(Oak's Night) sourced from Nastaran’s Dada (grandmother), who, following a series of failed pregnancies, vowed that if the baby she carried were born healthy, she would donate a doll each year for Ashura in her village, an annual day of dramatic public mourning in Shia culture. In doing so, Dada reinvented the symbol of Ashura, the alam, by adding such a doll to the top of the structure. Yet, the dolls Dada crafted year after year were based on those of the Bûke Baranê (rain-doll) ceremony, performed by girls in an annual Kurdish festive procession that implores rain to make rivers and nourish soil 'for the poor and the wretched' during seasonal drought. Dada invited death and mourning into an earthly call for justice, reconnecting it to possibilities in the land suppressed by systems of domination.

The (Oak's Night) procession translated Dada's Bûke Baranê ceremony within Canada's ecology, marked by Indigenous genocide and wildfires, where we walked in meticulously symbolic form to an old oak tree in Toronto's High Park, carrying inherited artifacts of power: Nastaran wore Dada's dress; Robert wore the stilled wristwatch of Nastaran's aforementioned uncle, collected from prison after his execution; Ömer Çakir carried the books he wrote in prison. All alternated carrying our re-creation of Dada's Bûke Baranê alam, Dada’s handmade doll, and two strips of red cloth drawn from Zagros burial practices.

Community leaders and members bearing stories of survival and resistance attended the forum and procession, responding to a call circulated through the CKCC, the Democratic Kurdish Federation of Canada, and our cross-ethnic networks. Participants included Çakir, a former political prisoner and Kurdish author; Jinoos Taghizadeh, Iranian artist, storyteller, and activist; Shokufeh Sakhi, former political prisoner and Iranian scholar; Setar Faithi, former Kurdish-Iranian guerrilla, photographer, and archivist; and Keyvan Soltany, political activist and community leader.

Sixteen such participants from the forum chose to join the procession, bringing their memories, pain, and hopes into the work, open to being addressed by its embodied gestures: carrying the alam in public space and submerging it in a pond; wrapping the oak in the red cloth and standing beneath it. These collective acts generated profound affective resonance, opened possibilities for collective healing, and reimagined exilic community power.

Following these events, we are creating a feature-length artistic film that weaves our documentation of (Oak's Night) by intuitive, philosophical, and poetic means into a comprehensive audio-visual story about the roots and potentialities of Dadkhahi and Jingeh Parizi. The film employs extensive archival research, reflective writing on (Oak's Night), and additional interviews and minor ritual actions in Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, and Tehran.