Weiße Witwe

When Aliah is brought a carpet from the German territories as a gift, she finds an old white guy rolling out. He has volunteered for a night with Queen Aliah in order to save his own race. Out of sheer curiosity, the Queen consents and has him bathed.

Come nightfall, he starts to tell her a long story, much like Scheherazade. It’s the story of the White Widow, who, in the year 2004, fell in love with Islam and had all infidels killed. Her love was strong and she wanted to be the one and only follower of Islam, so she had the believers killed, too. As Queen Aliah slowly realizes that he is telling her own story, she starts performing an erotic, frantic dance in which she imagines herself to kill everything that moves in a sensual frenzy. Until the old white man gets too tired to go on. He promises to continue the story in the following night. But will he survive the next morning?

Kurdwin Ayub (*1990 in Iraq) is a director, scriptwriter and artist. She studied painting and animation film at the University of Applied and Performative Arts and Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her first feature film SONNE premiered at the 2022 Berlinale and won her the best-debut award. Her second feature film MOND, starring Florentina Holzinger, premiered in competition at the Locarno 2024 Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize.

(WITH ENGLISH SURTITLES)