Queer parenting despite repression in Russia, the films keeping alive Kurdish heritage and the mismanagement of Tunisian football.

DISPATCH №51

Hello and welcome. Each week, Translator’s Dispatch brings you a curation of compelling stories beyond the Anglosphere.

On this week’s selection, our journey starts in Russia, where queer life persists under intensifying repression. Despite sweeping homophobic laws and the criminalisation of LGBTQ+ visibility, some queer Russians are still choosing to become parents.

Across Europe and the Arab world, we focus on Kurdish cinema, tracing how film-making and film festivals have become both an engine and a meeting point for Kurdish identity.

In Tunisia, a new investigation into the mismanagement of the national football team shows how individual ambitions and commercial interests are clashing, contributing to the team's decline.

P.S. - We read your suggestions, and a lot of them have made it into this newsletter. Feel free to recommend stories we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine. Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.

Don’t call me dad

Despite Russia’s homophobic laws, queer people in Russia are still choosing to become parents.

Writers Karen Shainyan and Yaroslav Rasputin, from a new Russian-language queer media outlet Just Got Lucky, collected five such stories, showing how the desire for children is stronger than fear. The testimonies were then published in Meduza. The true number of LGBTQ parents in Russia is unknown. For safety reasons, all names and locations have been changed.

The article describes many common experiences: the anxiety and adrenaline of parenthood, financial pressures, and fear of exclusion and violence. Their stories touch on how to find the right clinic, strained family relations, homophobia, and what it means to raise children amidst war and militarisation. All queer parents in Russia have to navigate coming out to their own kids in a country that denies them any recognition. The piece highlights stories of survival, but also ones of unexpected solidarity.

“I had a very masculine, ‘brutal’ friend whom I liked a lot,” recalls Artur, 32, an event producer from Khabarovsk. They both came out as gay. Another friend of his was a lesbian, and they agreed to have a child. Their bond deteriorated after she moved away and barred him from staying overnight, leaving him with little time with his son. He has even considered taking her to court: “I have a new partner who really wants to meet my son. My dream is for the three of us to go on vacation and take him to Disneyland.”

Andrey, 30, a teacher from Yekaterinburg, met his future husband on Tinder in 2019. He was initially somewhat unimpressed by the curly-haired lawyer in a bizarre sweater. They came from different worlds. But they shared one key goal: having kids. Andrey’s partner quickly married a female friend, bought a donor egg, and hired a surrogate mother. The cost of parenthood came to about 3.5 million rubles (£33,250 GBP/$45,500 USD).

When their twins were born, joy gave way to terror. Suddenly it was real: two tiny blue, wrinkly newborns. Andrey’s partner burst into tears when they brought them home. With a nanny’s help, parenting became manageable. Even with the threat of being sent to the army, Andrey remembers those years as happy. They already had tickets to Armenia when the call-ups began: “Thank God, everything blew over; but if it starts again, I’m ready to hide in a basement or go to Siberia or Brazil to avoid the war.”

The kids don’t call him dad, just Andrey. As a teacher, he is obligated to promote patriotism and the “traditional family.” No one at the school knows he’s gay. When he joined an LGBTQ parents’ support group, “something burst open inside me.” Now he’s reading Mikita Franko’s The Days of Our Lives, a raw first-person account of living in Russia as a trans man.

In November 2023, the Supreme Court of Russia labelled the “international LGBT movement” an extremist organisation, effectively banning queer activism across the country. It was around then that Marina, 47, from Moscow, started living together with Lena, whom she had met at a playground. “All my heterosexual experience now holds no value for me”, she recalls.

Marina’s own mother looks the other way when they meet on the street. She scolded Marina that she’d let a “member of the LGBT organisation” into her bed: “So, it turns out my mum coined the phrase before the Russian authorities did.” Another headache is her ex-husband, the father of her children, who lives one floor above in the same building. He’s threatened them several times. Marina has so far only come out to her eldest son. It is painful not be able to be more open in sharing her love.

Thanks to her therapist, Alina, 39, a marketer from Tomsk, installed Tinder on her phone and met Masha in 2021. A year later, they were living together and dreaming of having a child. Alina decided she would be the birth mother, “afraid that I wouldn’t be able to love a child who wasn’t biologically mine.” When IVF failed, Masha’s brother stepped in, and they did a home insemination. They decided to be open with their daughter: “It’s important for a person to know their roots.”

Alina wants to share the fact that she is a mother more widely, but keeps her personal life off social media. Masha feels the same: “We’ve had a child, I have so many emotions, so much happiness – and I can’t write about it. I can’t share it with anyone. I can’t tell anyone how she smiled at me for the first time.” It hurts that they can’t say “our” daughter to strangers.

Nina, 42, a lawyer from Chelyabinsk, fell in love with Tanya, who soon became pregnant with a donor’s help. When it came to the birth, they posed as sisters in order that they both be allowed into the labour ward. There are a few men in their circle of friends, so Nina shows her son how to drill and wash the car. At kindergarten, he prefers playing with the girls. “The two of us together,” Nina concludes, “are the perfect mom.”

“After February 24, 2022 (the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine),” Maria recalls that “it stopped mattering who thought what.” The thirty-seven year old music teacher from Yaroslavl had been together for almost four years with Vika, who had previously been married for 15 years, when her husband suggested a threesome. In the end, that never happened. Instead, Vika fell in love with Maria and left her husband.

The husband started threatening to take her sons, 12 and 9, away from her. The younger one sometimes says “my mums” in reference to Maria and Vika; but the older one objects: “No, Masha [a commonly used diminutive of the name Maria] isn’t family.” They don’t actively try to hide it; but they don’t shout about it. Everyone knows that it is the one thing you are not allowed to talk about in Russia.

A friend asks her whether she is afraid to be gay: “I told her that I’ve ‘killed my inner Putin’—that’s what I call it.” Her response is richly sardonic. She is no longer afraid, but she is also not protesting in the streets (“who the hell needs me anyway?”). The worst that can happen, Maria jokes grimly, is being sent to prison – where everyone is a lesbian! And it’s not just LGBTQ people who might face torture in today’s Russia: think of the soldiers in Ukraine. Being afraid just makes things worse.

The article concludes with the following saying: “a Russian always thinks either about moving abroad, or vanishing into the forest.”

This original source article ‘У младшего временами проскальзывает “мои мамы”’ by Karen Shainyan and Yaroslav Rasputin was published in Russian in Meduza on 31 January 2026.

It is available here.

Just Got Lucky is a new media platform for Russian-speaking queer people worldwide, covering LGBTQ news.

Meduza is an independent Russian-language media outlet. Labelled a “foreign Agent” in 2021, it operates from Riga, Latvia.

Summary by IJ.

Where Kurdish cinema finds a home

How film-making and film festivals in Europe have become an engine and a focal point for Kurdish identity and solidarity

There is (as yet) no state of Kurdistan. But in this article for the Turkish media outlet 1+1 Express (Birartibir), Adem Özgür and Merve Erol trace the rise of Kurdish cinema festivals in sustaining a sense of Kurdistan – across borders, and in diaspora.

The story of Europe’s Kurdish diaspora communities starts, for the most part, in the 1960s and 1970s, with waves of Kurdish labour migration from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The 1980s and 1990s brought a sharper political edge. Over time, these diaspora communities have played a critical role in shaping contemporary Kurdish identity, culturally and politically.

As Özgür and Erol report, Kurdish film festivals and the films themselves – from documentaries and short films to features – have been a powerful link, knitting these communities together and connecting them to their homelands of origin, divided among Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. The journalists trace the rise of these festivals: from the oldest and most institutionalised – the London Kurdish Film Festival – to Amsterdam, to more politically charged initiatives such as the festival in Berlin, and newer ones in Duhok and Qamishlo, and occasional ones as far afield as New York and Moscow.

The first major international success of Kurdish cinema, the article recalls, was Yılmaz Güney’s iconicYol (The Road). Winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1982, Yol’s work portrayed the intense repression following the 1980 military coup in Turkey.

But A Time for Drunken Horses – directed by Bahman Ghobadi, from Eastern Kurdistan (in Iran) – heralded a second critical turning point. The film won the Caméra d’Or in Cannes in 2000. Around the same time, a growing number of Kurdish filmmakers – Hisham Zaman, Kazım Öz, Hüseyin Karabey, and Hiner Saleem – began to gain recognition at international film festivals. The Kurdish Film Days were held in Vienna in May 2000. A year later, the London Kurdish Film Festival was established, serving as a blueprint for festivals across the diaspora.

The Cannes success of 2000 briefly inspired a new movement within Turkey, leading to conferences on Kurdish cinema and even the country’s first Kurdish short film festival. But that was then. The article notes that Kurdish cinema continues to face censorship, political pressure, and economic obstacles. Studio infrastructure is insufficient. Kurdish films are often ignored, underfunded, or denied access to mainstream distribution in the four main countries with substantial Kurdish populations.

In a sense, then, the importance of international festivals – their existence, even – is the flip-side of these realities. Writer and director Mizgîn Müjde Arslan describes how festivals are “like oxygen” for Kurdish filmmakers. If Kurdish films don’t fit in national canons, where are they supposed to go, but turn outwards into a transnational circuit of festivals?

And yet, she points out, international festivals often cater primarily to the host country's dominant cultural audience, rather than to diaspora communities themselves. “It is crucial that the thousands of Kurds living in London have the opportunity to watch their own films”, she tells Birartibir: “the fundamental aim of festivals should be for Kurds to hear their own voices and see themselves.”

There can be a certain “expected Kurdish movie pattern” in festivals, the article reports, where the same themes crop up again and again: the Rojava revolution, resistance, and the Yazidi genocide. Özgür and Erol suggest this may be partly due to what is considered “safe” by the selection committees, but also down to what Kurdish movies (with easily identifiable “Kurdish” themes) get European funding. That said, the article cites a new wave of directors increasingly trying to break the mold and the remarkable growth in the number of women directors (nearly half of those at the Amed/Diyarbakır festival in December last year).

But there’s another explanation for such strong recurring motifs in Kurdish cinema: reflections on borders, on migration, for example. Perhaps these are simply a true reflection of the realities of Kurdish lives, so frequently shaped by displacement, violence, and marginalisation; or even the result of the inherent community-building role of Kurdish cinema, for a people without a state. Film, in this reading, should be about nation-building. It should be collective, not individual. Diyar Hesso, organiser of the Rojava International Film Festival in northern Syria, held last November, tells Birartabir: “When a story emerges,” Hesso explains, “it is no longer the story of one person, but of the people”.

Ultimately, Kurdish film festivals should be seen not so much as cultural events but as temporary yet vital institutions: where circulation resists censorship, solidarity counters resource constraints, and memory confronts denial. In doing so, they ensure that Kurdish cinema continues to breathe, speak, and imagine Kurdistan itself into the future.

This original source article ‘Bellek, sürgün, festival’ by Adem Özgür and Merve Erol was published in Turkish in 1+1 Express (Birartibir) on 11 January, 2026.

It is available here.

1+1 Express (Birartibir) is an independent Turkish cultural, artistic, and political magazine and digital platform known for its focus on in-depth interviews, social movements, and critical analysis. It is published under the umbrella of the Bir+Bir Culture and Arts Association.

Summary by TMH.

Own goal in Tunis

A searing investigation into the (mis) management of Tunisian football

On January 18 this year, Senegal won the African Cup of Nations in a 1-0 victory over Morocco in the final. Celebrations in Dakar; commiserations in Casablanca. But in Tunisia, the failure of the Eagles of Carthage (as the national team is known) to make it into even the quarter finals after losing against Mali has produced something different: a wave of recrimination about the state of Tunisian football.

A two-part report by Matteo Trabelsi and Romain Molina for the Tunis-based outlet Inkyfada suggests the malaise in the country’s football extends far beyond the pitch. It is a story of governance failures, financial mismanagement, and commercial and personal interests taking precedence over the game's interests. At its heart are three people: Sami Trabelsi, the coach of the national team; Hussein Jenayah, the vice president of the Tunisian Football Federation (the FTF); and Safwen Aidi, cast as the man in the shadows, the “opérateur discret” behind the system.

Tunisia was forced out of the African Nations’ Cup on Saturday, January 3. Sami Trabelsi was fired in a Facebook post the next day. But Inkyfada suggests the higher-ups in the FTF had wanted to get rid of him long before that. A 1-1 draw against Brazil in November 2025 gave him a temporary reprieve.

But was he ever really in charge, anyhow? Hussein Jenayah, FTF vice president, was said to have decided who should be the team captain, countermanding Trabelsi’s choice. (This was apparently also the interventionist approach of Wadie Jary, a former FTF president now languishing in jail for corruption).

The sense that something is wrong in Tunisian football is “not just the fans or on social media”, Inkyfada reports. Coming off the pitch after the Mali game, midfielder Hannibal Mejbri called the situation of Tunisian football “sad”.

The first article highlights an embarrassing moment in the stands during the Tunisia-Algeria match of the African Nations’ Cup, when Jenayah allegedly attempted to enter the VVIP area and was rebuffed by security guards, prompting him to insult them. (Two protocol officials – one Algerian, one from Morocco – subsequently sent reports to the African Football Federation, the CAF). Later, Jenayah reportedly told a CAF disciplinary hearing that he was looking for a place for the Tunisian ambassador. But photos from the game showed she was already in her allotted place. Inkyfada suggests Jenayah simply wanted to get close to the president of the African Football Federation. Why?

The need for such proximity is perhaps related to the second major point of the article: the emergence of a network of individuals and commercial enterprises across African football, attempting to reap rich rewards from organising international matches.

Two companies are said to be at the heart of it: Sportedge and Africa TMS. Between 2022 and 2023, Inkyfada reports, they signed exclusivity deals with the football federations of at least seven countries across the continent: Madagascar, Togo, Niger, Benin, Liberia, Botswana and Djibouti. Safwen Aidi is said to be the key figure, working in conjunction with FIFA agent Moez Brahmi. One example: the FTF was charged one hundred thousand Tunisian Dinars for the Burkina Faso team to stay in the Sheraton in Tunis in June 2025, at a time when the federation said it didn’t have enough money to hire a foreign trainer. Who benefits? Financially, the whole setup is “without transparency”, says Inkyfada.

The article concludes with a quote from an unnamed individual close to the federation: “Getting rid of the trainer was an attempt to respond to the immediate sense of anger [at Tunisia’s early departure from the African Nations’ Cup]. But as long as these mechanisms continue to shape the governance of Tunisian football, Tunisia will be locked into a cycle of repeated failure”.

The second article in the series – largely an expansion of the first – claims the first had its own effect on the workings of the FTF. The first article was published on January 6. A meeting between the FTF and the sports minister was scheduled for the next day. In the wake of the article, Inkyfada reports that officials close to the Tunisian President intervened to push the meeting back by two days while the issues raised in the article were discussed internally. When it finally happened, Inkyfada’s insider reported that the meeting lasted six hours and yielded no new information.

Returning to the tournament, the second article suggests that Jenayah decided which players should participate, not with a view to winning matches, but to maintaining relationships with clubs and individuals. (The article notes that one player was looking for a last contract in the Gulf; keeping his role in the Tunisian team would help him do that). It claims that Jenayah will face no sanction for what happened during the Tunisia-Algeria game, citing phone calls from those close to him to the CAF. In the meantime, Safwen Aidi is said to be behind manoeuvring for Jenayah to be elected president of the CAF in 2027.

The charge sheet against the FTF is long. A case in which a leading midfielder wasn’t selected on the basis of what the FTF claimed was an injury, despite not having consulted his team. (The article suggests the spurious nature of FTF’s fitness assessment by noting that the footballer, who plays in Qatar, took part in two team-level games during the same time the African Nations’ Cup was on). An additional complaint: players who still haven’t received the money due to them for Tunisia’s World Cup qualification in September.

Translator magazine awaits the third instalment of the series…

The original source articles ‘Les coulisses du fiasco tunisien à la CAN, entre lobbying, insultes et ingérences’ and ‘Hussein Jenayah et Safwen Aidi, le duo qui a saboté la Fédération tunisienne de football’ by Matteo Trabelsi and Romain Molina were published in French in Inkyfada on 6 January and 13 January 2026, respectively.

They are available here and here.

Inkyfada is a Tunis-based media non-profit founded in 2014, specialising in investigative articles, data journalism, long-form reportage and contextualisation pieces.

Summary by CEM

We hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for next week!

The Translator team