Italy: Festival celebrating Kurdish cinema kicks off
By Adnkronos International, Rome
Dec. 09–ROME — The culture, plight and life of Kurds are being celebrated through a presentation of Kurdish films in Rome, as the third edition of the Kurdish Film Festival gets underway on Thursday.
The films on offer represent a range of features, documentaries and short films from across the Kurdish region and the Kurdish diaspora.
Highlights in the three-day festival include Nezahat Gundogan’s Two Locks of Hair: the Missing Girls of Dersim, which comes to Rome after its debut screening at the Istanbul Film Festival earlier this year.
The picture seeks to illuminate a dark period in Turkey’s history as it re-unites two cousins who survived the so-called ‘Dersim operation’ in 1938 when thousands of Kurdish and religious minority Alevi inhabitants were killed while many young girls were given to high ranking Turkish families to be ‘Turkified.’
Zara by Ayten Mutlu, focuses on a village and Alevis, a minority splinter sect of Shia Islam in which the director represents ‘Cem,’ which refers to a religious service in the Alevi faith.
Other films include Crossing the Dust by Shawkat Amin Korki, an Iraqi Kurdistan drama set during the fall of late strongman Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 focusing on a lost boy who can’t find his parents, and whose safety is threatened because his name also happens to be Saddam.
From Turkey, the documentary Berivan, The Legend Of Rebellion, tells the story of folk hero Berivan Cizre who led the 1992 Kurdish uprising.
Organizers say the festival includes all ‘three types of Kurdish films’ which they define as, those by Kurdish directors who live and work in Kurdistan, films by exiled or ‘diaspora’ Kurdish directors as well as films by non-Kurdish directors placed in a Kurdish setting.
Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi received international acclaim when his movie The Time For Drunken Horses won the Cannes Film Festival prize for first works in 2000.
Other recognised Kurdish directors such as Hiner Saleem, best known for Vodka Lemon and Jano Rosebiani with the film Jiyan followed. These directors are credited as forerunners to an emerging cinema identity thanks to their ability in giving a strong voice to a neglected, but large ethnic population.
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Tagged in: film festivals, Iraqi Kurdistan, Italian film festival, Kurdish culuture, Kurdish films, Kurdistan
