Biography
Ziad Kalthoum was born in Homs, Syria in 1981. He studied film in Moscow and was an assistant director for several feature films and TV productions. His first short documentary film "Aydil" ("Oh, my Heart", SY 2011) portrayed a group of Kurdish women that decided to live in a society without men. Coinciding with the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2012, Kalthoum began working on his first documentary feature film "Al-Rakib Al-Khaled" ("The Immortal Sergeant", SY 2012) about his own schizophrenic experiences with having to serve in the military and being assistant director of a big film production at the same time. "Al-Rakib Al-Khaled" premiered at the International Film Festival in Locarno in 2014 and was then screened at a number of other international film festivals. In 2015, it won a prize in the category "Feature Documentary" at the BBC Arabic Festival in London. Already much earlier, shortly after finishing the film, Kalthoum had deserted from the Syrian army and had fled to Lebanon from where he moved to Berlin.
His next documentary feature, the German-Arabic co-production "Taste of Cement - Der Geschmack von Zement" ("Taste of Cement", 2015-2017) about the precarious situation of Syrian refugees working on construction sites in Lebanon, premiered in 2017 at the Festival Visions du Réel in Nyon, Switzerland and won the festival's Grand Prix for Best Feature Film. The film was screened at numerous other international film festivals and won a number of further awards. "Taste of Cement - Der Geschmack von Zement" also received a nomination in the category "Best Documentary" at the Deutscher Filmpreis and was released in German cinemas in May 2018.