KurdishCinema
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in USA from 20th of July 2007 5th London Kurdish Film Festival |
Film about Kurdish female PKK leader Nuriye Kesbir KurdishCinema.com - 12 January 2008 The International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) is in its 20th year, and claims to be the biggest of its kind in the world. It's a marketplace where film buyers, filmmakers, and film lovers all come together for screenings that cover a vast range of non-fiction topics. Often the films give a deeper insight into geo-political hotspots than what is normally available in the news media. One such film is 'Sozdar, She Who Lives Her Promise", which just premiered at the IDFA. The central figure in the film is Nuriye Kesbir, who has named herself Sozdar. She is a leader in the Turkey's Kurdish Workers Party, also known as the PKK, a rebel separatist movement with a stronghold in the Kurdish mountains on the border of Turkey and Northern Iraq.www.ekurd.net The director of the film, Annegriet Wietsma, was drawn to the idea of a woman fighter. "I wanted to make a movie already for decades about the Kurdish problem but I always hesitated, because the level of testosterone was a bit too high for me. But then I read about this woman who was in Dutch jail. She was having a hunger strike, and I thought: 'This is my chance.'" Nuriye Kesbir: Alleged 'terrorist' On a trip to Europe in 2001, Kesbir was arrested at the airport in the Netherlands. She spent several years fighting extradition to Turkey. Wietsma says, "For the Turkish she is a terrorist. Therefore they ask for her extradition wherever she will be. The judge didn't want to extradite her because the Turkish government didn't want to give guarantees that she would have a fair trail and not be tortured, raped, whatever. Because they said: 'We just don't torture and don't rape so we don't do it with her either.' And the Dutch judge said: 'Well, we keep her here until we have these guarantees.'" The film also gives insight into the Kurdish community living in Europe. "Everybody is in motion. Nobody knows exactly: 'Am I Kurdish, am I Western, am I Turkish, what am I?' So that's what you see also with how people dress and behave." Bombing
telling anyone. Wietsma was able to follow her later because of contacts she had made in the Kurdish movement. She speaks of the danger she encountered there:
always dangerous because the week before I went two guys were hit by a grenade and killed. Of course it's a dangerous part of the world. Particularly now.www.ekurd. net The regions where I filmed are now in real danger and there's man to man fighting, there's grenades falling from the air by the Turkish army."
next, Wietsma offers this opinion: "Nobody will know what will come in the next couple of months. My personal conviction is: you can bomb these 10,000 girls and boys and men and women in this mountainous region. The guerrillas. But you never can bomb and erase the problem of 40 million Kurds being an unwanted people. You can't bomb that problem." Source: Radionetherlands (www.ekurd.net) |
