Kurdish cinema

The first film of what has become known as Kurdish cinema, was Zare, and was shot in 1926 in Armenia and directed by Hamo Beknazarian; however, only in the 2000s did Kurdish cinema begin to rise as a recognizable genre.

History
Bahman Ghobadi, Iranian/Kurdish film director at the San Sebastián International Film Festival.

The Kurdish cinema was shaped by the fate of the Kurds as people without a state. Kurdish movies often show social grievances, oppression, torture, human rights violations and life as a stranger. The Kurdish cinema has a high significance for the Kurds, as it offers the opportunity to draw attention in an artistic way to their own situation. However, due to state repression, filming is not an easy matter. So most films are produced in exile. The best example of this is Turkey, where the Kurds were not allowed to speak their mother tongue until 1991; which made the development of Kurdish film difficult.[1]

One of the founding father of Kurdish cinema, a figure that is admired by Kurdish Filmmakers today is Yilmaz Güney, despite all restrictions that were forced upon him by the Turkish Government, Güney managed to portray the richness of Kurdish cultures in his films, such as in Sürü and Yol.[2] Yılmaz Güney started making films in the 1950s. For his film Yol - The Road from 1982, he received the Palme d`Or at the Cannes Film Festival.[3] His death in 1984 in Paris meant the end of Kurdish film for a long time, just where he came to international fame. However, in 1991 another Kurdish film called "A Song for Beko" by Nizamettin Ariç from German-Armenian production followed. In 1992, Mem û Zîn followed by director Ümit Elçi from a Turkish production. The film Siyabend and Xecê dates back to 1993 and was also produced in Turkey. The number of film releases is steadily rising u. a. Productions from Iran. Bahman Ghobadi, for example, received the Peace Film Prize for his film at the Berlinale in Berlin for his movie "Tortoises can fly". Over the years Kurdish cinema has symbolized mainly the sufferings of the Kurdish people in the Middle East.

Miraz Bezar's movie Min Dît: The Children of Diyarbakır won awards at the film festivals in San Sebastian, Hamburg, and Gent. Also it was the first movie at a Turkish film festival in the Kurdish language ever at Golden Orange Film Festival in Antalya and won the special prize of the jury.[4] In the last couple of years in Germany and Switzerland film production companies are created by Kurdish filmmakers in exile, who receive public funding from the states they lived in, for example, NEWA Film Berlin[5] or Frame Film GmbH Bern.[6]

Yilmaz Güney, Jano Rosebiani, Bahman Qubadi, Shawkat Amin Korky, Mano Khalil, Hisham Zaman, Sahim Omar Kalifa and Yüksel Yavuz are among the better known Kurdish directors. Some Kurdish Filmmakers live and work outside Kurdistan, such as Hiner Saleem.[7]

Films

The following is a list of some better known Kurdish films that are critically acclaimed have the highest rating on IMDB are:[8]

Directors
Jano Rosebiani
Yeşim Ustaoğlu

New Kurdish Documentary Movement

In the past decade, a new style of New Kurdish Documentary Movement has taken shape in all four part of Kurdistan. Kurdish filmmakers uses documentary films as a tool to educate mainly Western viewers, especially showing their films in Film Festivals and over Social Networking sites to bring attention to the past historical and current evens that has and is taking place in Kurdistan,[9] many of these documentaries are shot in cinema Cinéma vérité styles, with small budget and crews.the New Kurdish Documentary Movement of filmmaking presented a documentary style with direct sounds on film, required less light, shooting at natural light and on location. Filming techniques included fragmented, discontinuous editing or long takes to present reality without manipulation. The combination of objective realism, subjective realism, and authorial commentary created a narrative ambiguity in the sense that questions that arise in a film are not answered in the end. [10] Many topics of the film deals with the past or present Kurdish issue when the films were made[11], such the Kurdish refugees crisis in Karzan Kardozi's I Want to Live (2015), the Kurdish genocide of Al-Anfal campaign in Taha Karimi's 1,001 Apples (2013), and the daily lives and struggle of the Kurdish PKK fighters in Ertugrul Mavioglu's Bakur (2015). Notable films of this movement include:

  • Close up Kurdistan (Yüksel Yavuz, 2008)
  • Banaz a Love Story (Deeyah Khan, 2012)
  • 1,001 Apples (Taha Karimi, 2013) [12]
  • Der Imker (Mano Khalil, 2013)
  • Hope – Hêvî (Yüksel Yavuz, 2013)
  • Bakur (Çayan Demirel & Ertugrul Mavioglu, 2015) [13]
  • I Want to Live (Karzan Kardozi, 2015) [14]
  • Dil Leyla (Asli Özarslan 2016)
  • AMED – Memory of a city (Yüksel Yavuz, 2016)

The film Banaz a Love Story, directed and produced by Deeyah Khan is about Banaz Mahmod, a 20-year-old Kurdish woman from Mitcham, south London, who was killed in 2006, in a murder orchestrated by her father, uncle and cousins.[15] It won the 2013 Emmy award for Best International Current Affairs Film.[16]

See also

References
  1. "KurdishCinemaHomePage". kurdishcinema.com. Retrieved 30 May 2019.
  2. Biswas, Pradip (1999). Yilmaz Guney: Cineaste Militant. USA: the University of Michigan. p. 10. Archived from the original on 2017-01-15. Retrieved 2016-09-20.
  3. "Yilmaz Güney". IMDb. Retrieved 2019-08-22.
  4. "Kritik zu Min Dît – Die Kinder von Diyarbakir - epd Film". www.epd-film.de. Retrieved 30 May 2019.
  5. "NEWA FILM -". Retrieved 30 May 2019.
  6. "Frame Film GmbH". Retrieved 30 May 2019.
  7. Koksal, Ozlem (2016). Aesthetics of Displacement: Turkey and its Minorities on Screen. USA: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 123.
  8. IMDB. "Most Popular "Kurdistan" Titles". IMDB. IMDB. Retrieved 18 September 2016.
  9. Cardullo, Bert (2012). World Directors and Their Films: Essays on African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern Cinema. Scarecrow Press. p. 210. ISBN 0810885247.
  10. Berger, Verena; Komor, Miya (2010). Polyglot Cinema: Migration and Trans-cultural Narration in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. LIT Verlag Münster. ISBN 9783643502261.
  11. Olson, Debbie C; Scahill, Andrew (2012). Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema. USA: Lexington Books. p. 9780739170250.
  12. Hill, Jessica. "1001 Apples departs a poignant message". TheNational. Retrieved December 11, 2013.
  13. Letsch, Constanze. "Film-makers withdraw from Istanbul festival in censorship protest". TheGuardianWeb. TheGuardian. Retrieved 13 April 2015.
  14. Cardullo, Bert (2012). World Directors and Their Films: Essays on African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern Cinema. USA: Scarecrow Press. p. 215. ISBN 0810885247.
  15. "Banaz Mahmod 'honour' killing cousins jailed for life". BBC News. Retrieved 20 April 2015.
  16. THE DEADLINE TEAM (August 14, 2013). "International Emmy Current Affairs, News Nominees Announced". deadline.com. Retrieved August 17, 2013.

Sources
  • Cardullo, Bert (2012). World Directors and Their Films: Essays on African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern Cinema. Scarecrow Press. p. 210. ISBN 0810885247.


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