Zahraa Ghandour's Flana: A powerful Iraqi documentary exposing honour crimes and the erasure of women

When Iraqi actress and filmmaker Zahraa Ghandour began digging into the disappearance of her childhood friend Nour, she already knew the landscape she was walking into.

Working for TV and media, for nearly 15 years, she has documented the lives of Iraqi women and girls — stories marked by early marriage, honour crimes, legal loopholes, and the quiet, relentless policing of female existence.

What she didn't know was how deep this specific story would cut into her own family history.

"I was absolutely aware of the issue with girls abandoned or killed by their families only because they were female," Zahraa tells The New Arab.

"But I was not aware of what happened with Nour exactly. I've been telling stories about what's happening to women for about 15 years. People even make jokes about me in Iraq. They say I'm too feminist. But I don't care what I am called and even reproached about. I believe in the importance of exposing these issues."

Zahraa Ghandour's new film Flana, one of the nine features, presented at this year's Horizons of Arab Cinema Competition of the Cairo International Film Festival, braids her childhood friend Nour's mysterious missing with the filmmaker's own memories, tracing how girls disappear long before they physically vanish: uncelebrated at birth, restricted at home, married too young, blamed in death.

The film won a Special Mention for Best Arab Feature Film at the 46th Cairo International Film Festival.

However, disappearance has another vocabulary in Iraq, one that Zahraa threads through the film with quiet precision.

Flana is an Arabic word used across the region, pronounced differently but carrying the same meaning: a woman whose name is forgotten, erased, or deemed unworthy of mention.

"It's the term you use when the woman's name is gone, when she becomes no one, people just say 'flana died, flana was killed.' Not even a person worth naming."

For Zahraa, the word marks a societal reflex: women reduced to placeholders, their identities swallowed by shame or violence. In a graveyard shown in the film, we see that the stones themselves bear no names.

"Just blank markers," Zahraa says. "That's flana."

But at the heart of the film stands another woman: Zahraa's aunt, who's been the community's midwife for many years and helped Nour come into the world — a fierce, unfiltered, self-described non-regretful single woman who becomes both witness and guide.

The inherited silence

When Zahraa sits across from her aunt in the film's opening, the intimacy is disarming. The camera barely feels present.

"My aunt shocked me," Zahraa laughs. "It was the first time I turned the camera on her, and she just talked. No hesitation. I asked her, 'Have you appeared in a film before?' She said: 'After all these years, you think that your little camera is going to scare me?'"

The aunt, whom Zahraa describes as a "second mother", had lived through her own ruptures: leaving home at 14, building an independent life, refusing marriage in a society where marriage is still viewed as a woman's primary identity.

"She's the ultimate feminist in my life," Zahraa says. "She always told me: 'Why would I marry someone who wants to control me?' You cannot tell this woman what to do. Ever."

One of the film's quieter revelations is that many of today's Iraqi women and men remain single.

"It's happening everywhere," Zahraa says. "But in Iraq, women are more aware of how marriage can take away their liberty. Men too. People want partners who understand them, not just someone to have children with."

Divorce rates are "insane" in Iraq now, she adds. "It tells you something about the shift."

The warmth of the exchanges between the filmmaker and her aunt is punctured by grief: revisiting Nour's story and her sudden disappearance without a trace means revisiting a pattern they all recognise.

"When we spoke about Nour, after filming, we just sat in silence," Zahraa says. "There are things that are still too heavy for both of us."

'What did she do?' — the reflex that kills

Zahraa has spent years documenting honour crimes for Iraqi television. She describes the ritualised public reaction: "Whenever a girl is murdered, the first question people ask is: 'What did she do?' Even in my own family. Even yesterday, an Egyptian woman in the audience asked me: 'Why are they killing their daughters?' As if there could be a reason. There is nothing a girl can do that justifies being murdered."

Yet the law suggests otherwise. Iraq's penal code still contains provisions dating from 1969 that sharply reduce sentences for honour crimes. If a man claims he killed a female family member "for honour", he typically receives no more than three years, and often spends only days in custody.

"Some don't go to prison at all,"  Zahraa explains. "They go to the police station, explain themselves, and leave."

The consequences ripple through families: girls denied inheritance so male relatives can claim full ownership of property; daughters thrown into the street; children forced into labour or abused by traffickers.

"When a newborn girl is not celebrated – and many families still don't celebrate girls – that's where it begins," adds the filmmaker.

"The uncelebrated baby becomes the disrespected child, and sometimes the murdered woman."

The girls who survive

One of the film's central figures, Leila, survived this chain of disposability. Her sister did not escape unscathed: sold to a pimp at age nine and forced into sex work. She appeared briefly in an early edit of the film.

"But I took her out," Zahraa says. "I had to. It would have ruined her chances at a future in Baghdad. She accepted being exposed, but I couldn't do that to her."

Leila herself lives in a fragile state of independence, renting a small room in a rough Baghdad suburb with another woman.

"It's her first home ever after living in a girl's shelter," Zahraa says. "Her first taste of safety. And because of that, I will not screen the film in Baghdad until she leaves the city."

There is more at stake. Zahraa is already preparing for a legal battle with the Ministry of Labour, which oversees the disclosure of the terrible conditions in the shelter where Leila lived, described in the film.

"They threatened me," she says calmly. "But I knew this day would come. It's worth it."

Fighting to tell Iraqi stories differently

The film took over six years to complete, partly because Zahraa refused to surrender creative control. Early in the process, a German co-producer attempted to acquire the movie entirely.

"They sent me a contract that basically said the film is theirs and I'm just someone on the ground," she recalls.

"It was insulting. They didn't know me, didn't care about the women, and never asked how things were going. They just wanted ownership."

The producers required the film to lean into protest, activist-type of footage – "the sexy, expected way," she says, rather than the intimate personal narrative she insisted on. 

"There's a Western gaze that expects screaming in the streets," Zahraa says. "But that's not the film I was making."

Also, since taking the film abroad, another recurring comment has followed the director: that she "doesn't look Iraqi."

"It's the media," she says, amused.

"These stereotypes come from the images the West keeps reproducing: Iraqi women as sad, miserable, suffering. But come to Baghdad, and see everything – different faces, classes, colours, styles. We don't look one way."

She walked away from the producer's proposal and continued producing on her own until French partners joined in post-production. Today, she retains 80% of the rights.

"I'm constantly telling Iraqi filmmakers: don't rush to sign. It's better to struggle than to lose your film."

The project eventually found support from Doha Institute, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Whickers Award, described by Zahraa as "the hardest competition of my life", the Doxa Fund, CNC, Bertha/IDFA Fund, and finally, in the film's last stage, Iraq's newly launched national film fund.

"The Ministry of Culture promised they would evaluate the quality of the storytelling, not the political subject," she says. "And they kept that promise."

Zahraa Ghandour is currently developing an impact campaign for screenings in Iraq and internationally.

But her goal remains the same as when she pointed a camera at her aunt's kitchen table: "I want people to understand that these girls don't just disappear — they're erased. And someone has to keep insisting on their stories."

Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric, and goEast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films