Movie | 9 Days in Raqqa

Followed by Q&A with the director, Xavier de Lauzanne and Marine de Tilly (journalist)

Leila Mustapha is Kurdish and Syrian. Her fight is Raqqa, the former capital of the Islamic state of three hundred thousand inhabitants, reduced to a field of ruin after the war. An engineer by training, mayor at just 30 years old, immersed in a human world, her mission is to rebuild her city, to reconcile, and to establish democracy there. An extraordinary mission. A French writer crosses Iraq and Syria to meet her. In this still dangerous city, she has 9 days to live with Leila and tell her story in a book. Watch the trailer!
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Xavier de Lauzanne, after having worked in the hotel industry, in 1999 launched into the production of committed, independent documentaries, essentially focused on the human. After several collaborations with television, She made her film debut with his first feature-length documentary, With One Voice, which received recognition from numerous festivals in France and abroad. She continued with Children suitcases and the Pépites which made the event in theaters when it was released in 2016 with more than 220,000 spectators. She then embarked on the production of a trilogy of three feature documentaries on the post-war period in Iraq and Syria. The first part, entitled 9 days in Raqqa, is part of the Cannes 2020 Official Selection and will be released in September 2021 in France. The second part, In complete freedom, will be released in France on March 8, 2023. Also in March, her film on the Cambodian royal ballet La beauté du geste / The Perfect Motion will be released in theaters in Cambodia.

Marine de Tilly was born in 1980. Author, literary critic and great reporter, she has produced numerous reports in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh; for Le Point, Le Figaro Magazine, Elle, GEO… In 2016, she signed with the first Consul of France in Iraqi Kurdistan “L’Homme Debout” (Stock). His book on and with Leila Mustapha, “La Femme, la vie, la Liberté”, will be released in 2020 by Stock; and “The Black Book of Nagorno-Karabakh”, collective work of the Center for Research on Intelligence (Éditions Ellipse) in 2021. She has just collaborated in a collective investigation at the heart of a Regiment of Marine Troops (“Les Écrivains sous the flags”), published in November 2022 (Fayard). She has been a member of the Society of French Explorers since 2020.