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10/28/09
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First Kurdish Film Festival in US Showcases Diaspora Culture
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By Carolyn Weaver, VOA,
New York
 Organizers call it "a cinema across borders," the
first-ever festival of Kurdish film in the United States. The films chosen for
the five-day event at New York University focused on a people widely dispersed,
from those who still live in traditionally Kurdish areas in the Middle East, to
Europe and North America. Across sometimes impassable barriers, they keep alive
a shared language and cultural identity.
That struggle is both mirrored and sustained by a burgeoning Kurdish cinema,
according to Sally Eberhardt, a director of the festival. She said organizers
were confronted with a wealth of good films, but had slots for only nine
full-length films and ten shorts.
"Choosing was incredibly difficult," she said. "We were primarily limiting
ourselves to films from the last few years, but even in doing that, there were
so many films to watch. There's no shortage of amazing Kurdish film out there."
Yol, which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, was
chosen to represent the rich history of Kurdish cinema. The story of five
Kurdish prisoners in Turkey, it was written and directed by the late Yilmaz
Güney when he himself was in prison. His assistant, Şerif Gören, shot the film
based on the director's notes smuggled out of prison.
Eberhardt says festival organizers screened films from all the regions where
Kurds now live, their culture threatened by borders, war, repression or sheer
distance. The Kurds' traditional homeland, called Kurdistan, touches on parts of
Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia, but Kurdish communities now can be found
in many other countries, too.
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In Bawke, a young boy is abandoned by
his father |
Sadness at the loss of home, or separation from other Kurdish people and
culture, pervades many of the films chosen for the event. "Bawke," for example,
by Hisham Zaman, is about a Kurdish father of a young son who faces being
deported from Norway, their latest hope for refuge in a seemingly endless
journey. He pretends not to know his son after he is arrested, so that the boy
will be able to remain behind and have a better life.
"The theme of borders seems to go through a lot of the films," Eberhardt said,
"and the divisions between the Kurds that happen by no fault of their own,
through borders that were established decades ago, that they have had to live
with ever since."
Half Moon, by Bahman Ghobadi, was the one film that is explicitly about
borders. It follows the journey of Kurdish musicians living in Iran who travel
to Iraq to celebrate the end of Saddam Hussein's rule, and new openness for
Kurdish music. "In weaving their way from Iran through Turkey into Iraq,"
Eberhardt said, "it becomes this brilliant metaphor for how can it be that
people who were once united now have to take this torturous path to go from one
section of where they live, to another section of where they live."
Eberhardt noted that prejudice against Kurds and repression of their language
and culture continue in some countries. The Storm, by Kazim Öz, which
made its U.S. premiere at the festival, is about an apolitical young man who
leaves his village in southern Turkey in the early 1990s to attend university in
Istanbul. There he experiences government-backed violence against Kurdish
activists, and is radicalized. "He witnesses what's happening in Istanbul, and
the repression that's starting to mount there," Eberhardt said. "He makes this
really serious journey within the film."
Films by and about Kurdish women were another theme of the festival. In
Dengbej Women, by the Women's Collective of Atölyemor/Filmmor Women's
Cooperative, female dengbej, or traditional Kurdish bards, tell their stories,
and sing their sad music. For many, a life in music still means rejection by
their families.
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A scene from
Vodka Lemon |
A dark comedy, Vodka Lemon, by Hiner Saleem, closed the festival. Set in
a wintry mountain village in Armenia, it tells the story of a widower who,
during visits to his wife's gravesite, happens to meet and fall in love with a
much younger widow. She is also a barmaid who serves up the drink of the title
in a little shack in the snowy landscape.
The festival also featured a rare panel discussion among five Kurdish filmmakers
from around the world, including Saleem, Ghobadi, Öz, Zaman and Jano Rosebiani,
who made the feature film, Jiyan, about the aftermath of the 1988 gas
attack on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja.
... Payvand News - 10/28/09 ... --
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