The film narrates the story of three women who are connected to each other through the invisible string of trauma and isolation. In the absence of motion, the spectator deep dives into a manic silence, into the expansive loneliness of the trauma and alienation. The images investigate the entire time and timelessness of human existence in an isolated space and the enigmatic territory between fiction and reality. With a lucidity that is both daring and tragic, the film explores the extremity of a woman‘s inner life and the painful traces of memory when the outer world is at an impasse. The women of the film constantly ruminate on the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion on one hand, and on the idea of death on the other, where the absolute limits of survival are tied to the sense of the border between two. A border that does not exist.

Dir. Helin Çelik - 91min - 2023 - Austria, Spain

"Helin Çelik’s otherworldly, impressionistic documentary opens with lines from a poem by Rumi evoking Mount Qaf, a mystical mountain erected by Allah. In this place that encircles the Earth and touches heaven dwells the anqa, a fabled female bird that symbolises resurrection after misfortunes. The three Jordanian women at the heart of Çelik’s film are going through their own journeys of healing and rebirth." - Guardian

"Helin Çelik does not tell these women’s stories, but rather sketches their post-traumatic situation in impressive, poetic film imagery....Anqa shows how these women struggle not to allow the suffering they have experienced to define them. “I am not the remains,” one of them says. “I exist.”" - Berlinale

"The close-up shots, the fragmented confessions of the women, and the textural examination of their environments inside their homes – come together as an emotional mosaic of the aftermath of trauma....a cinematic treatment of pain. Çelik makes art out of suffering and, by that, reaches the universal, cutting to the core of these three women’s existential experiences. And by that, one gets to feel – not for them, but through them – the quintessence of darkness and pain." - Modern Times Review

"Between dream and fantasy, reality remains at a standstill. Cobwebs tell of the suspended time in a remote, dimly lit refuge in Jordan, where three generations of women gradually reveal their experiences of violence. In calm images and extreme close-ups, the director creates an intimate proximity to her protagonists, literally crawling under their skin." - *Winner* Grand Documentary Film Prize, Diagonale

"Anqa is an intimate portrait of three women who decide to stand up and speak out, who declare that they exist despite the threat of death. It is an exploration of a woman’s inner life and, in its most extreme, of the painful traces memory carries when the outer world is at an impasse." - Ann Arbor Film Fest

"The sunlight that Çelik captures penetrating the curtains and windows almost seems like an intruder, a promise or a threat from the outside world. Silently, it draws mysterious shapes on the carpeted floor or is reflected in the mirror." - Cineuropa

"an extremely intimate view into the lives of women who refuse to give up." - Film Carnage