Kurdish-Iraqi director Shahram Alidi’s Whisper With the Wind, which is screening in Critics’ Week, has been picked up for international sales by UMedia.

Alidi’s debut film, shot in Iraqi Kurdistan, is about a postman who has travelled among the mountainous villages of the region, delivering messages for many years. One day, a partisan commander asks him to make a recording of his new-born baby’s first cry. The postman sets off to find the commander’s village but, while there, learns that all the children in the area, as well as the commander’s pregnant wife, have been evacuated to a far off valley. He sets off to find them.