Kurdwin Ayub
Turning the Inside Out
May 29, 2025
Thirteen years ago, Kurdwin Ayub was first honored with a special at the Viennale. At the time, the filmmaker – born in Iraq and raised in Vienna – was just 22 years old and already making waves with her performative video works. Her pop culture-inflected exploration of gender clichés, authenticity, and self-staging was as radical as it was intimate, as much an expression of a rebellious spirit as of an empathetic capacity for reflection. Her desire to subvert conventions with humor and to defy expectations runs through her often autobiographically inspired short films. Drawing on her own family and travels to her parents' Kurdish homeland, she began using her own migrant identity search as an anchor point while sharpening her anti-patriarchal perspective. Ayub always remains close to the people she portrays, embracing ambiguity and clearly enjoying provoking her audience – through moments of weirdness or raw directness.
Ayub studied painting and experimental animation at the University of Applied Arts and performative art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Today, she lives in Vienna, working as a director and screenwriter, and is considered – especially following her Berlinale and Locarno award-winning feature films Sun (2022) and Moon (2024) – one of the most original and distinctive young voices in European cinema.
This year she will also present her first theater work, White Widow, at the Wiener Festwochen – an ideal occasion to shine the spotlight on her remarkable body of shorter works. (Daniel Hadenius-Ebner)
With Kurdwin Ayub in attendance
In collaboration with Vienna Shorts, sixpackfilm, and Wiener Festwochen
Thirteen years ago, Kurdwin Ayub was first honored with a special at the Viennale. At the time, the filmmaker – born in Iraq and raised in Vienna – was just 22 years old and already making waves with her performative video works. Her pop culture-inflected exploration of gender clichés, authenticity, and self-staging was as radical as it was intimate, as much an expression of a rebellious spirit as of an empathetic capacity for reflection. Her desire to subvert conventions with humor and to defy expectations runs through her often autobiographically inspired short films. Drawing on her own family and travels to her parents' Kurdish homeland, she began using her own migrant identity search as an anchor point while sharpening her anti-patriarchal perspective. Ayub always remains close to the people she portrays, embracing ambiguity and clearly enjoying provoking her audience – through moments of weirdness or raw directness.
Ayub studied painting and experimental animation at the University of Applied Arts and performative art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Today, she lives in Vienna, working as a director and screenwriter, and is considered – especially following her Berlinale and Locarno award-winning feature films Sun (2022) and Moon (2024) – one of the most original and distinctive young voices in European cinema.
This year she will also present her first theater work, White Widow, at the Wiener Festwochen – an ideal occasion to shine the spotlight on her remarkable body of shorter works. (Daniel Hadenius-Ebner)
With Kurdwin Ayub in attendance
In collaboration with Vienna Shorts, sixpackfilm, and Wiener Festwochen
