Kurdish Aspect, CO
Dec 26 2007

5th Kurdish Film Festival in London

Kurdishaspect.com – By Bestun Baban

More than one hundred films, nearly one hundred directors, and three
to four hundred people in the audience: these were the elements of
the film festival. Once again, cross-border smugglers, bombs going
off during wedding-parties, mass graves and Anfal, Saddam and
peshmergas, chemical attacks and children’s swings were the main
subjects of the films. Crying, lamentation, and folkloric
caterwauling provided the main musical themes for most of the films.

Most of the films were not very good. From an artistic point of view,
they could not have been said to be art for art’s sake; most were
aimed at influencing people in a nationalist direction. Either the
subjects were peace, guerrillas, struggle, etc, especially in the
films from the north; or crying about something that happened in the
past, such as chemical attacks or the Anfal ;and some of them were
seeking to promote nationalism by using Kurdish costumes, religion
and festivals and Kurdish culture generally. Some of the films really
consisted of TV reportage, and were not documentary films at all.

While most of the films were about the suffering of the Kurds at the
hands of Arabs, Turks and Persians, not a single one was about the
suffering of Kurdish people under the Kurdish Regional Government,
although for many years the level of corruption and robbing the
country by officials has been very high, and the people have been
suffering from shortages of gas, water, electricity and health
services – which should be a good subject for films.

>From my point of view, repeatedly showing the disasters of the Anfal,
chemical attacks etc, no longer serves anybody else except the new
rulers of Kurdistan, who want people to keep living in the past and
to keep fearing what happened in the past, so they will stay
frightened and not do any thing to challenge their autocratic almost
royal rule. If in the past the Baathists destroyed the villages and
forcibly removed the inhabitants, now the same villagers leave their
villages voluntarily because their products can’t be sold at a price
from which they can live off, and they get more money when they
become police. If in the past Kurdish women were forcibly raped by
the Baathists, today the same things happen through the use of money
and misuse of government positions.

I don’t know why we should continually have to put the death and
destruction and bombardments of the past into the heads of the new
generation via TV or cinema, or why instead of music they should
continually have to listen to moaning and lamentation. Why do we make
them always live in the past instead of allowing them to move
forward? In my opinion this is a crime, and it means we are bringing
up generation after generation in the wrong way. I think this is a
part of why most Kurdish people have psychological problems. I
personally am not going to thank anyone who brings a woman in front
of the camera and makes her cry for her dead relatives, as a result
of which he becomes a film director.

Another point about the festival was that most of the films shown
were set in villages, and they spoke about the lives and problems of
villagers, and seldom spoke about city life and its problems. In most
of the short films the directors of the film wrote the scripts too,
and also did the lighting and sound – another reason why the films
were poor quality.

Nevertheless the photography in some of the films was very good,
especially in `Border’, (Sattar Chamani Gol), `Oven’, `Father’, `The
People of the Peacock’, `Snowy Day’s Night’, `Rain’, and `The Unseen
Seen’, though carelessness over choice of music could be seen in the
fact that many of the soundtracks contained poor music; and in some
cases the sound quality itself was poor. Instead of instrumental
music, villagers’ laments were often used. Where instrumental music
was used, it tended to be unsuitable music that had not been made
specially for the film.

If you looked at some of the films carefully, you could see that some
elements of the plot were very similar to the plot of `A Time For
Drunken Horses’ by Bahman Ghobadi, for example `My Beautiful Son will
be the King’, `Border’ and `Miss Unfortunate’.

The best short film was `The Father’, but because it was not entered
for the competition, it did not get any award. Instead, the Festival
Special Prize was given to `My Beautiful Son will be the King’ by
Salem Salavati, (9m); `Water’, director Mahdi Hasan, (10m) won the
Bronze Prize; `Pain’ by Hana Namdari, (3m) won the Silver Prize; and
`Border’ by Sattar Chamani Gol, (10m) won the Gold.

The prize competition was restricted to those films that were between
1 and 30 minutes long, so not all the films in the festival were
eligible for prizes.

The best of the documentary films was `Traces: the People of the
Peacock’ by Binevsa Berivan in which she carefully showed all aspects
of the lives of the Yezidi Kurds in Armenia. Also `Lanzo’s Box’ by
Sami Mermer, which was about homeless people in America, was very
successful, though if it had been a little bit shorter, and if the
theme of homelessness had not been artificially linked to the
question of Kurdishness, it would have been even better. Also this
film and `Chair’, which was about the hard life of the disabled
Argentinian singer Ruben Rodriguez, by Kia Aziz, were the only ones
that were not about the Kurds.

Amongst the long films, `A Vehicle Ticket’ was good, but the name
didn’t match the contents, and the ending was inappropriate. From the
beginning the director treated all aspects of the film very
carefully, till the conflict came to crisis point, but then when the
audience was waiting for the expected clashes between the two sides,
the film ended abruptly. In my opinion the ending ruined the film,
and the film should have a sequel made to balance what happened in
the first part. If a mullah were as fundamentalist as he is shown in
the film, he would never give up his position so easily to a
teenager, as happened in the film. If a sequel were made, it would be
more realistic to see the mullah go and get assistance and support
from somewhere to strengthen his position in the village.

`Winterland’ by Hisham Zaman was well-received. The difference
between this film and others was that it was not a political film,
but a film that dealt with social situations in a comic way. By the
standards of Kurdish cinema you could say it was successful.

Another film which was good was `Crossing the Dust’ by Shawkat Amin
Korki, in which the director successfully put you into the atmosphere
of that day when Saddam was removed from power, and in the whole film
tragedy and comedy were mixed together. You could see the sense of
humanity in the film. What spoiled it somewhat was the names of
several Barzanis appearing in the credits as supporting the film. I
don’t know why the nation’s money should be given as a favour, as
Saddam used to do, by Barzani’s family to a director to make a film,
and with the condition that their name appear at the end of the film,
rather than a director being entitled to get funding to make a film
for the Kurdish people.

In the absence of a film by Bahman Ghobadi, the audience was waiting
for a good film by Hiner Saleem, but unfortunately that is not what
they got.

The first film by Saleem was a French film called `Beneath the
Rooftops of Paris’, which was too long. If the film had been only 30
or 40 minutes long, it would have been successful. But what the
audience saw was very annoying, because there was a lot of
repetition, and by the time the main character had died, the audience
was dying of boredom.

Saleem’s second film `Dol: The Valley of Tambourines’ was very bad
and there were a lot of mistakes and technical faults in it:

Saleem read the map of Kurdistan upside down: the film showed people
in Turkish Kurdistan wearing Kurdish clothes and speaking Kurdish,
but men in the villages in Iraqi Kurdistan wearing suits and caps.
Worse, it showed Iranian KDP peshmerga wearing trousers and running
shoes, when in fact they would wear Kurdish clothes. Also they spoke
Kurmanci. And when they had a wedding in the film, they were wearing
suits and ties, even though they were supposed to be peshmerga
enduring difficult conditions in the mountains. I had a foreign
friend with me, and he asked me `Why do they say in Turkish Kurdistan
that they are not allowed to speak Kurdish or wear Kurdish clothes?’

If you showed anybody the scene where the father is wearing a black
hat and long black coat and leaning on a stick, and his sons are
dressed in sharp black suits and ties, and each of them stand facing
in different directions, they would think they were watching a film
about the Italian mafia, not a Kurdish film.

During the journey of the main character (a Kurd from Turkey) through
Iraqi Kurdistan, the phrase `Now is the time of rebuilding’ was
repeated many times. This meant that the Kurdistan Regional
Government was very busy rebuilding the country; but in his film you
could not see any sign of rebuilding at all. In fact the places which
he filmed were exactly like Afghanistan or like a landscape in a
Western – you could only see bare red mountains and occasional groups
of horses.

There are two wedding parties in the film, one of which ends with a
skirmish and the other of which ends with a bombardment. If a
non-Kurdish audience saw this, they might think that every Kurdish
wedding party ends with severed arms and legs flying – which is just
not the case. Who would believe that?

In the scene where the bodies are being searched for in a mass grave,
the man wears gloves and is using a brush to remove dust from the
bones as though he were working on an archaeological site. The same
scene in `Crossing the Dust’ is much more realistic when you see the
movement of the bulldozer and the people moving round in the dust
looking for the bodies of their relatives. In the mass grave scene in
Saleem’s film there is a man standing on an elevated piece of ground,
and beside the man there are four or five white bags. There are some
women queueing, and when they go forward, the man gives each of them
a bag and they go back without any crying or any expression of
sadness, just as though they have won a prize and they are collecting
it, not taking back the bodies of their relatives.

When the main character in the film has repaired the KDP Iran’s radio
transmitter, the equipment is shown playing music as though it were a
normal radio, not a broadcasting station.

Huner makes the peshmergas out to be idiots, because in his film the
camp of the KDP Iran consists of four or five white tents each
pitched on the top of a bare hill, without any cover and easy for the
enemy to locate. This is during the time when the peshmerga always
chose a very well-hidden place for a camp, especially if they were
operating a radio station.

The ending of the film was like the ending of a Bollywood film. The
main actor came into the village during the day with a pistol in his
hand, which is not realistic, since if you were illegal and the enemy
were looking for you, you would only enter the village at night, and
your gun would be hidden. He came in during the day, and after he was
fatally shot with his bride, they staggered around in circles for
several minutes, while someone appeared with a tambourine and started
playing it, which was completely incomprehensible.

The film started with a scene of a bull looking at the Turkish slogan
on a hillside `How happy is he who is a Turk!’. In my opinion this
was a very good beginning, but then suddenly the bull died and the
farmers sat sadly round it in a circle. I think this was a big
mistake, because the film should have ended with the same motif. What
should have happened, after all the injustice and fighting in the
film, was for the bull to be seen again, still looking at the
chauvinist slogan on the hillside, seeing it as the source of all
this trouble; or indeed for the bull to have been shown looking at
the slogan after every terrible event in the film. But I think the
director’s idea was for the bull to die of sadness when it saw the
slogan. In my opinion the bull dying at the beginning changed the
balance of the film unfavourably.

After all this struggle for his Kurdishness by the main character,
there is no hope in the film, as he dies right at the end. It would
have been much better if the film had ended with him escaping from
the village with his bride, among all these dangers, leaving it open
as to whether they would survive or not, and leaving some room for
hope in the film. To make a comparison with `Crossing the Dust’,
towards the end of that film, the child sees the dead body of the
peshmerga as alive again, which implies that he has hope for the
future and that good things can happen again.

At the end of the film Saleem was asked by a member of the audience
if it would have not been better for a Sorani woman to play the role
of the female KDPI peshmerga, rather than a Kurdmanci woman speaking
in Kurmanci. Saleem said `We Iraqi Kurds are a much more backward
society than any other part of Kurdistan. I tried to do that, but I
didn’t find anyone. In the beginning I found a Sorani speaking woman
who wanted the role, but the first day she came with her
mother-in-law, the second day she brought her father-in-law, and on
the third day she brought all her tribe, so at this point I escaped’.
I was unable to restrain myself and called out to Saleem that what he
said was not true, because just in a city like Sulaimaniyah you have
dozens of girls and women working in theatre and acting, and at this
point when Saleem saw that I was right and he did not have any
excuse, he said `Oh I am not talking about Sulaimaniyah, that is a
quite different place.’ So I said `OK why didn’t you look for actors
there?’ and he didn’t have any answer.

After this argument a well-known Kurdish historian Dr Kemal Mazher
said that he bowed down before for Saleem’s talent. `I could not show
the pain of my nationality in five hundred pages of writing as well
as he did in this film’. If this is true, I said to myself, it would
be better if everyone left their writing jobs and bought cameras and
started shooting films. Saleem’s reply was that he too bowed down to
his great teacher of history, and the conversation became an exchange
of compliments, although there was a lot of material in the film
which warranted discussion.

Anyway to conclude, I would say that overall the festival was not
bad, but there were too many weak films in the festival which the
organisers should have weeded out more carefully. On the other hand,
the attendance at the festival was generally low. In some films there
was an audience of no more than thirty or forty people, and in many
showings the first floor of the cinema was closed because of the
small audience. The reason for this as I understand it was that the
organising committee was late in putting out publicity for the
festival.

Note: the festival ran from 30 November to 6 December 2007.