An 8 year old girl scrubs at a carpet in a white tent and carries a bag of clothes on her head. Around her, children can be heard laughing and she looks up at them. This is Evlin, an 8-year-old girl living in a refugee camp on the Syrian-Turkish border. Evlin is one of thousands of children who fled her hometown of Kobane when ISIS attacked and attempted to massacre them.

RESISTANCE IS LIFE is an emotional, eye-opening documentary that follows Evlin and the Kurdish people who have been forced to leave their homes. The documentary explores that for the refugees in the camps, resistance is now their everyday life. It allows us to see the war through the eyes of the children in particular: while some children would normally sing silly songs, children in the camps sing songs of fighting and empowerment. Evlin is no exception. A bright smile constantly seems to adorn her face as she talks about her life in the camp and chants “Long live the resistance of Kobane!” She plays with her friends and takes pictures “like a journalist”. She helps her mother with chores and looks after her two younger brothers. She goes to school in a tent and receives excellent grades in all her classes. The only unusual thing about her is her status as a refugee. She idolises the women soldiers on the front line, acting as one in a school play. The photographs, she takes to document the pain she sees in the camp. She plays with skipping ropes but also uses a stick as a gun to practise drills. This seems the case for most of the children. Whilst unsettled by certain memories, the children seem almost unfazed by their displacement, seeing it as temporary thing and that someday they will return to their homeland. Grizzly shots of the war, graves of soldiers, unexploded bombs, wreckages of tanks and ruins of buildings are all juxtaposed with the shots of the children- the war is in close proximity to them but not quite touching their lives- perhaps because they refuse to let it.

The adults of the film too refuse to let their past traumas affect their outlook. Whilst they openly fear for their children, they strongly believe that they will someday take them back to Kobane with the help of the resistance. The fighters on the front line are predominantly young women- making up 80% of the fighters and they serve as a sort of role model for young Evlin. Ranging from 18 years old and upwards, the women are bringing the fight directly to ISIS and battling for their homeland. Perhaps one of the most moving scenes in the documentary is centred around a gathering of the refugees from the camps at the border near Kobane. They shout “Long live the resistance of Kobane!” as loud as they can in the hopes that the nearby soldiers will hear their support.
At the heart of the documentary is the spirit of the Kurdish people. The peace sign is a recurring feature in the film and a smile and a song is never far from their lips. Though they are dishevelled and some of them “broken” the remain strong against the force trying to destroy them.

RESISTANCE IS LIFE is seventy-minute eye-opening documentation of the resilience of the Kurdish people and how they refuse to give up their homeland to ISIS. As Evlin’s grandfather says in the film, “this isn’t a story.” This horror is real for these people. But despite this, resistance is their everyday life.