You Won’t Feel a Thing

Directed by Hiwa K

When the artist felt a pain in his lower back—“sharp, deep, ancient”—he went to the hospital for a scan and was told that he had a kidney stone that only invasive surgery could remove. Preferring to avoid, if possible, the transactional nature of the contemporary medical industries, he went to visit a local traditional healer. What happened would call into question the marginalization of Indigenous forms of knowledge and healthcare by the corporate interests of Western medicine, which “arrived into Kurdistan after the war, like an invasion.”