CULTURE-TURKEY: Kurdish Directors Make 'National' Cinema

• by Daan Bauwens (diyarbakir)
• Wednesday, December 16, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Turkey's first Kurdish film festival, held Dec. 4 -13, featured films previously unscreened here, by Kurdish directors from Iraq, Iran, Turkey and the United States. In fact, the festival focused mainly on the young generation of Kurdish directors from the diaspora.

'This was a historical opportunity,' Mustafa Gundogdu, co-organiser of the festival, told IPS.

Following the break up of the Ottoman empire Kurdistan, the land inhabited by the Kurdish people, was shared among what is now southern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq and northeastern Syria with political reunification considered impossible.

'This was the real start of Kurdish cinema, in the place [Turkey] where it should have started years ago, right here. We are showing movies to the public that have been seen all around the world, except for the place where it mattered most,’’ said Gundogdu who is the founder of the London Kurdish Film Festival and the New York Kurdish Film Festival.

Other co-organisers of the festival, which had screenings on the first eight days and panel discussions on the last two, were the Diyarbakir Cinema Centre and the Metropolitan Municipality of Diyarbakir.

Ever since Iranian-Kurdish director Bahman Gobadi won the Golden Camera award in Cannes with his ‘A Time for Drunken Horses’ there has been a serious interest in movies made by young Kurdish directors.

'Together with the increase [in interest] the world has begun to recognise Kurdish identity,' said Zeynel Dogan, coordinator of the cinema workshop at Diyarbakir Metropolitan Municipality.

'This increase is interlinked with our struggle for freedom,' Dogan told IPS. ‘’We want to bring these movies together and try to establish a definition of Kurdish cinema.'

The film festival featured six movies set in six different Kurdish regions. For instance, ‘Kilometre Zero’ by director Hiner Saleen depicts the ethnic struggle between Kurds and Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq war. ‘David and Leyla’ by Jalal Jonroy is a love story between a Jewish boy and a Kurdish girl, both living in the United States, ‘A Little Bit of Freedom’ by Yüksel Yavuz touches on the subject of Kurds adapting to a new life in Germany.

'We did not select the movies on that theme, but all of them somehow explain the pain that Kurds suffer where they live,’’ Dogan told IPS. ‘’Fundamentally the conference was about standing up for, or affirming the language, culture and identity of Kurds. We have to try to establish a Kurdish ‘national’ cinema without having an official state.'

After the film screenings, academics and filmmakers from all around the world held discussions to define the concept of Kurdish cinema.

Nasir Hassan represented the Iraqi Kurdistan regional government (KRG) at the conference. As head of the cinema directorate in KRG, he announced that the first Kurdistan cinema lab would be built in March and he welcomed all young Kurdish filmmakers around the world to this new facility.

'We are here to see how we can help,’’ Hassan told IPS. ‘’This is an important region for Kurdish cinema. But still, we don't know what is happening here. Kurdish people are divided into four parts, not mentioning the Kurds in Europe and America. Our cinema can make these four parts meet, this is a way to reach each other.' Gundogdu added that Kurdish cinema could 'destroy the borders between us that were created by others.'

The panelists agreed that Kurdish cinema was characterised by the search for a homeland, journeys across borders and the culture of memory.

According to Oxford film academic Tim Kennedy who has done research on Palestinian, Kurdish and Armenian films, the most important marker of Kurdish cinema is the preservation of memory.

'In these movies, there's no specific cultural element you can really call Kurdish,' Kennedy told IPS. ‘’But it is the concept of a culture being endangered, not wanting to lose itself, and these films suggest in an innovative, subtle way that it is being preserved in different ways.'

Miraz Bezar's internationally acclaimed ‘Children of Diyarbakir’ was the only film at the festival which depicted the struggle of Turkey's Kurds. Set in the 1990s, it tells the story behind the frequent extrajudicial executions and disappearances of people in Diyarbakir at that time.

Bezar himself is of Kurdish origin, was born in Ankara and moved to Germany when he was six years old. 'I had the wish to tell the stories that were always kept secret, I wanted to give a voice to the people that suffered in the nineties,' he told IPS.

‘’People had been crying out for years that their relatives had disappeared, but for a long time it stayed a political issue, nobody felt the personal side of it. I wanted to make a fundamental statement so the stories wouldn't disappear as easily as the people did,’’ Bezar said.

‘Children of Diyarbakir’ was the first film in Kurdish ever to be selected for the national competition of the Turkish Golden Orange Film Festival, held two months ago in the southern city of Antalya. It was received well by the audience, but it was the protests outside the theatre that made the headlines in the national media.

According to Bezar, the time has not yet come for complete acceptance of Turkey's past handling of the Kurdish issue. 'My film is only opening a door,' he told IPS.

‘’Without question there have been massacres by paramilitary groups in the nineties. I've seen a very wide audience in Antalya that accepts this. But this is not easy for everyone to accept,’’ Bezar said.

‘’This movie is just one step. In the future, other films handling these issues will be more easily shown. If you have a vision of a democratic Turkey, this could be the way it develops into a multicultural society.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

Where next?

Advertisement