By Alexandra Di Stefano Pironti

BARCELONA, Spain – Stories that flow on film like poems of startling images; a lingering melancholy; a ceaseless journey: Kurdish filmmakers use cinema as a catharsis for suffered hardships. But they tell their stories with a warmth that gives them universal appeal.

Films by Kurdish filmmakers are slowly beginning to gain wider recognition and acclaim, since Turkey-born director Yilmaz Guney blazed the trail with Yol, which won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival in 1982 and subtly recounts Kurdish suffering under the Turkish junta.

“Kurdish directors mainly want to convey the suffering of their people,” Iraqi Kurdish filmmaker Shawkat Amin Korki told Rudaw. “Most of them have known the same suffering and experiences of wars and migration. This has a reflection in their movies.”

In January, this year’s edition of the Tromso International Film Festival (TIFF) in Norway featured several films by Kurdish filmmakers, including Guney, Korki, Iran’s Bahman Ghobadi and Norwegian-Kurdish director Hisham Zaman.

“Kurdish filmmakers have the ability to make their stories interesting,” TIFF director Martha Otte told Rudaw. “I think there is a lot of warmth in the Kurdish films I have seen, and often humor as well. This gives their stories more universal appeal.”

At festivals in Tromso, London, Montreal, Cannes and others, films by and about Kurds are opening windows on this stateless nation of 30 million people, who have suffered under autocratic rulers in Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria.

The films shown at Tromso capture the lives of Kurds in Iraq, where they were massacred and gassed by Saddam Hussein until wresting autonomy in 1991 and cementing it after his 2003 overthrow; to those in Turkey, where until about a decade ago it was illegal to even speak Kurdish; and the millions in Iran, where the Kurdish regions are the country’s poorest and most neglected.

The idea of a Kurdish sidebar at TIFF crystallized after Otte met filmmakers at the Duhok International Film Festival in Kurdistan.

“I had already seen quite a bit of Kurdish films at that point, and become more engaged in the Kurdish situation, not least due to what is going on in Syria,” said Otte.

Ten Kurdish films were screened at Tromso.

1001 Apples by Kurdish-Iranian director Taha Karimi, who died in a car accident last year, features the story of Faraj, a survivor of Saddam Hussein´s Anfal Campaign against the Kurds. All My Mothers retells the tragedies inflicted by Saddam’s regime through the stories of women who lost family and loved ones.

Korki’s Crossing the Dust captures the story of two Kurdish freedom fighters after Saddam’s fall. Their happy mood changes when they have to decide what to do with a lonely child, an Arab named Saddam, who they find crying by a road in the desert. The movie depicts the suffering of both Kurds and Arabs under the dictator.

Korki himself was forced in 1999 to flee to Iran – like many other Iraqi Kurds – where he started directing short films and theater.

Now living in Erbil, he said: “I make movies to express what I think about things. If I had not become a filmmaker I would have been a painter or a writer.”

Iranian-born Ghobadi, director of the highly acclaimed A Time for Drunken Horses that was also screened at Tromso, says that he did not create a film; he recreated real life events.

“I recreated life in front of my camera exactly as it was,” Ghobadi said in an interview to the Tribeca Film Festival. “My films are a mirror of my own life,” he said. “In my films I am looking to be relieved of my own complexes.”

He spoke about the difficulties of making films in places like Iranian Kurdistan, saying that even to find actors he had to wander the streets of Kurdish villages, looking for people and then convincing them to act in his films.

“There is a good effort by Kurdish filmmakers to make movies under any conditions,” agreed Korki. He believes that Kurdish cinema is directed mainly at non-Kurds.

“This is because still there is no cinema industry in Kurdistan, so there is no genre in Kurdish cinema,” he said.

The Kurds no longer live only in the Middle East. The sufferings visited on them under different Middle Eastern autocrats have spawned a large Kurdish Diaspora in Europe, and in descending numbers in the United States, Canada and even Australia.

Hisham Zaman, a Norwegian Kurd who was born in Iraqi Kurdistan and whose films have received more than 20 national and international awards, in the Letter to the King tells the story of a group of five Kurds on a day trip to Oslo, highlighting the situation of refugees living in the Diaspora.

Otte, the director of Tromso, said it was important for her not only to highlight the plight of the Kurds, but to reinforce to Norwegian’s that they should not take their own freedoms for granted.

“It is definitely important for me to attract attention to the fact that the Kurdish people have no country of their own, no constitution, no institutions,” she told Rudaw. She said she hoped she could “help Norwegians to understand that their constitution should not be taken for granted, and that they should be interested in helping other people to achieve this.”

Now, film festivals like Tromso and Duhok are helping advance Kurdish films. TIFF has established a cooperation agreement between the Duhok International Film Festival and the Nordic Youth Film Festival in Tromso.

Four Kurdish youths and four young filmmakers from Northern Norway came together during TIFF in January for a workshop, where they made a short film together, said Otte.

“We don’t have variety in subjects yet in Kurdish films,” Korki noted. “But I think, in the coming years, we will have different movies, too.”


Rudaw