Self
In the 1990s, fearing persecution from the Turkish government, about 2,000 Kurdish refugees of Turkish nationality came to settle in a suburb of Tokyo. Here live Ohzan (18), Ramazan (19) and Memet (38). This documentary focuses on these three young Kurds in Japan.
The story puts İlhan Çomak at the center, even though he is not physically present in the film. It focuses on the 21 years that İlhan spent in prison and his family’s experience of those years without him. The narrative is constructed through the letters İlhan wrote and aims to describe his life, his emotions and longings. The film constructs İlhan’s history through a chronology in the prison but refrains from restricting it only to a “prisoner’s quest for justice”, and rather tells a story of the situations he finds himself in over the years and his emotions and their equivalents in life.
In the 1990s, some newspapers were not allowed to enter the Diyarbakir region, under a state of emergency at that time, although they were legal. Children like Bawer and Hebûn, who were part of the distribution group, would secretly collect these newspapers from outside the city at a previously agreed location and take them to the planned meeting place in the city. There, the children changed their clothes and went out to distribute them, under the guise of other work. But they were constantly followed by those who saw the newspaper as dangerous and wanted to prevent its dissemination. Çerx is a testament to the conditions under which these newspapers were distributed to readers and the difficulties encountered.
This Rain Will Never Stop takes the audience on a powerful, visually arresting journey through humanity’s endless cycle of war and peace. The film follows 20-year-old Andriy Suleyman as he tries to secure a sustainable future while navigating the human toll of armed conflict. From the Syrian civil war to strife in Ukraine, Andriy’s existence is framed by the seemingly eternal flow of life and death.
“Binxet – Under the border” is a journey between life and death, dignity and pain, struggle and freedom. It takes place along the 911 km of the turkish-Syrian border. On the one hand the ISIS, in the other Erdogan’s Turkey. In the middle the borders and one hope. This hope is called Rojava, only one point on the chart of a troubled region, a region of resistance and an example of grassroots democracy that speaks about gender equality, self-determination of peoples and peaceful coexistence.
Kawa Nemir is like a walking dictionary of the Kurdish language. He flees Turkey and takes refuge at Anne Frank's former house in Amsterdam. Will he be able to finish the translation of Ulysses and publish it?
"The Last Season: Shawaks" revolves around an extended Shawak family whose life is marked by seasonal migration.
The story of two youngster girls who became the victims of female genital mutilation.
In a snowy Kurdish mountain village, in the east of Turkey, an old woman Berfé and her granddaughter Jiyan are distressed. The only man in the household, Temo, the son of one and the father of the other, was arrested by the Turkish military. The commanding officer has been told that the villagers are hiding weapons, so he arrested all the men and announced that they will be kept in prison until their families hand over the weapons. The problem is that there are no weapons in the village. Desperate, Berfé and Jiyan embark on a long journey, in search of a gun which they could exchange for their beloved Temo. Will the old woman and her innocent granddaughter find a way out of the inextricable Kurdish identity conflict?
After their father dies, a family of five children are forced to survive on their own in a Kurdish village on the border of Iran and Iraq.
Turtles Can Fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iraq border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall.
Aslı Erdoğan, world-renowned author and activist, has fallen into silence after she fled to Germany. Incomplete Sentences is a feature documentary on her literature and life, leading to exile in Frankfurt, after the Turkish regime’s oppression results in her unlawful imprisonment. Now, she struggles in exile while everybody is waiting for her to write again. Right after getting out of prison Aslı starts telling her story to the director, wandering in the streets of Istanbul she recites parts from her books and explains the stories behind. When Aslı goes to Germany to receive the Erich Maria Remarque Award she cannot return; thus her exile, which she likens to a semi-open prison, begins. As her health deteriorates and keeps her from writing, the tragedy in her books becomes her own reality.
Shobo is a young woman who is in a misery situation for having a child, a decision that has a particular impact on her life and her people.
Director Hüseyin Tabak explores the legacy of Yilmaz Güney — political dissident, convicted murderer, and visionary Kurdish filmmaker — who directed the 1982 Palme d'Or–winning Yol from inside prison and died in exile just two years later.
A unique interview with Tooba Gondal, the woman who groomed and lured scores of Western women to join ISIS. Using social media, she became a deadly matchmaker, recruiting a number of high-profile “jihadi brides” for ISIS militants in Syria: she allegedly helped organise the transporting of three British schoolgirls, including Shamima Begum, to Syria.
Casimê Celîl was born into a Yezidi Kurdish family in 1908, in a village called Kızılkule, located in Digor, Kars. The village and family life, which he longed to remember throughout his life, ends with the massacre they endured in 1918. During his long road to Erivan, Armenia, he lost all his family members. Left all alone, Casim was placed into an orphanage and was forced to change his name. To remember who he was and where he came from, every morning he repeated the mantra “Navê min Casim e, Ez kurê Celîlim, Ez ji gundê Qizilquleyê Dîgorê me, Ez Kurdim, Kurdê Êzîdî me”, which translates to: “My name is Casim, I am the son of Celîl, I come from the village of Kızılkule in Digor, I am a Kurd, and I am Yezidi”. He clings to every piece of his culture he can find, reads, and saves whatever Kurdish literature or art he comes across. As the year’s pass, Casim finds himself with an impressive collection of Kurdish culture and history.
Turkey's history has been shaped by two major political figures: Mustafa Kemal (1881-1934), known as Atatürk, the Father of the Turks, founder of the modern state, and the current president Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, who apparently wants Turkey to regain the political and military pre-eminence it had as an empire under the Ottoman dynasty.
Bahar, the commanding officer of the Daughters of the Sun, a battalion made up entirely of Kurdish female soldiers, is on the cusp of liberating their town, which has been overrun by ISIS extremists.
If Sidik manages to spot a leopard in his beloved mountains of Kurdistan, the area can be declared a protected nature reserve. Will that finally bring peace?