Hiner Saleem (also transliterated as Huner Salim), is an Iraqi-born Kurdish filmmaker, who was born in Aqrah, Iraq, in 1964. He left Iraq at the age of 17, attending university in Italy and later moving to France. Following the Gulf War of 1991, he returned to Iraq to film conditions in Kurdistan at that time. The first film that he wrote and directed, "Vive la mariée... et la libération du Kurdistan," was released in 1997. Other films included "Vodka Lemon" (2003), set in post-Soviet Armenia, and "Kilomètre Zéro" (2004), a film set in Iraqi Kurdistan during the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. In 2004, he published a memoir titled "Le fusil de mon père : Récit" (Paris: Seuil), with the English translation appearing the following year as "My Father's Rifle: a Childhood in Kurdistan" (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).