By Mathew Scott:
BUSAN, South Korea — Kurdish film programmer Mustafa Gundogdu rests his head on his hand for a moment as he considers the fate of his culture and of his cinema.
“The first word that comes to mind when you think of Kurds is existence,” he says. “In the places that Kurds live their very existence is constantly questioned. And it is the same with Kurdish cinema.”
A delegation representing the Kurdish film industry has been trying to address that notion this week at the 15th Pusan International Film Festival, Asia?s most important film event.
This year it includes a special section — “Kurdish Cinema: The Unconquered Spirit” — which is showcasing eight Kurdish productions. There has also been a seminar in which the whole nature of Kurdish cinema was questioned.
“Does Kurdish cinema even exist?” asks Gundogdu, who heads the Kurdish programme at the festival and also runs Kurdish film festivals in London and New York.
“Well, we are here today so that shows that it does. The industry has been slowly growing and like the Kurdish population itself, its voice is getting louder.”
With their homeland split as national borders were redefined after World War I, the Kurdish population has found itself divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Thousands of ethnic Kurds have left those nations, often claiming persecution, and it is through these communities that the Kurdish cinematic movement has over the past decade really started to take shape.
Help came after the autonomous Kurdistan region was formally established in Iraq in 2005 after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Its government has started to set up film schools and, importantly, to fund films made by Kurds in Iraq, and from all over the world.
Director Miraz Bezar has been one who has benefitted and he has been attending screenings of his film “The Children of Diyarbakir” at the festival in the South Korean city of Busan.
Bezar, who lived in Turkey before his family moved to Germany while he was still a child, explained that there have long been Kurdish filmmakers but it is only in recent years that they have established themselves as a collective.
“We all take inspiration from Yilmaz Guney,” he says of the director whose “Yol” won the top prize, the Palme d?Or, at the Cannes film festival in 1982.
“For a long time he was considered a Turk when in fact he was Kurdish and his films were always about the Kurdish situation. In our films, there is always a political message because our situation is purely political.”
Bezar?s film looks at three children coping with life after their parents are murdered and he has recently been able to screen the production in Turkey — a situation previously unheard of.
“When I was growing up, whenever we travelled my mother used to have to change my first name from Miraz to Marat, a common name in Turkey, to hide the fact that I was a Kurd,” he says.
“We had to leave to get our freedom. And it has been those Kurds in exile who have thus had the chance to be creative, to become individuals who create because in Turkey and other countries this was not allowed as these countries have denied our very existence. But we are slowly finding our voice.”
The breakthrough for modern Kurdish film — internationally at least — came at last year?s festival when Shawkat Amin Korki was handed the prestigious New Currents award for his film “Kick Off.”
“Kick Off” traces the story of refugees struggling for existence inside a football stadium and has since been screened at festivals all over the world.
Hassan Ali Mahmoud was a producer on that film and has his own production in the running for New Currents this year. Mahmoud?s film centres around a farmer who tries to save his crops from attacks by a murder of crows.
It is, he readily admits, a reflection on the life of the Iraqi Kurds under Saddam Hussein.
“We have lived with wars for so many years, and the Kurds have lived with persecution,” he says. “So I found myself continually asking why. There are young Kurdish filmmakers now making films but we have few places to show them. “Thankfully with the help of festivals like this, people are becoming aware of films and aware of our stories. It gives us hope.”
Mano Khalil is also in Busan with the documentary “David the Tolhildan” which focuses on the life of David Rouiller, a young Swiss national who left his homeland in 2001 to join the Kurdish freedom movement PKK.
Khalil has been based in Switzerland since the late 1980s. He says he cannot return to his home in Syria after authorities there in 1992 questioned the fact a Czech newspaper had referred to him as a “Kurdish filmmaker”.
“I was imprisoned for a short while and have not been able to go home,” he says. “They showed me the clipping — which was by then about four years old — and they made it clear I was not welcome.
“The paradox for us is that you make a film and in Europe or America they applaud you but in your own country they call you a criminal, a terrorist, a separatist.”
For Khalil, though, the fight for recognition goes on.
“They say a hungry person cannot dance or sing,” he says. “And we Kurdish filmmakers are still hungry.”