If there’s one word that describes the Middle East’s recent history, it’s surely “unrest”. Filmmaker and director, Yüksel Yavuz, returns home from Germany armed with his only weapon – his camera – and sets about to show the plight of his people during the dismissal of the Kurdish in Turkey since the 1970s.
Except Yavuz’s home isn’t a home as we in the west would recognise it – it’s a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. In a series of interviews with his family, friends, a female guerilla, an author and ex-soldiers, Yavuz unravels the memories of thousands who were forced to flee conflict in Kurdistan. The stories of Yavuz’s interviewees are heartbreaking, while the shots of children marching up and down and repeatedly chanting slogans such as “Every Turk is born a soldier” are as despairing they are disturbing; the unapologetic attempts to render the future of Kurdish being nothing more than, at best, a dialect of Turkish, is incredibly uncomfortable viewing.
For all its interesting and often shocking content, director Yüksel Yavuz has been unable to maintain any real momentum; with overly long scenes and a drawn-out, fumbling narrative, the audience are left restless and, in one case, asleep. But with Turkey making on-off signs that it wants to join the European Union, Yavuz’s film is a valuable contribution to an otherwise underrepresented and misunderstood issue that’s still shockingly inherent in our ally.