with german hard-subtitles Close Up Kurdistan (2007) - Yüksel Yavuz
Close Up Kurdistan - Yüksel Yavuz - 2007 (Germany)
In the documentary film Close Up Kurdistan the Kurdish director Yüksel Yavuz creates a connection between his personal story of immigration and the current situation of the Turkish - Kurdish conflict. In the film he makes a personal journey which takes him from Hamburg through Stockholm to Turkey, ending in the north of Iraq, in the refugee camp Maxmur in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Throughout this journey he meets among others his parents and old friends, some of whom went to the mountains to become guerrilla fighters, others who fled the country and went into exile. The rest which were forced to stay in the homeland villages were persecuted and murdered, because they fought for justice and cultural freedom, which still doesn’t exist in Turkey. One of the main protagonists is the intellectual Dr. Ismail Besikci who, because of his academic research on the Kurdish culture, had to spend 17 years in prison. Then there is Abdulkadir Aygan who fought as a counterguerrilla in the `dirty war` against the Kurdish resistance. The role of the women during that period of anger and hatred is also defined very well, for example there is Berivan, who became a guerilla fighter and left her family to live and fight in the mountains. Although she knew that an arrest meant not only her death, but also humiliation and torture, she decided to become a member of the kurdish movement.
The film makes a tight linewalk between political facts and personal stories and asks many questions: Why is Turkey not able to solve the Kurdish question? Why did a bloody civil war, where relatives and friends fought against each other, take place? How is the situation today? How will Turkey behave as a country in the ongoing negotiations with the European Union? It shows us that totalitarianism on both sides resulted in a senseless war that nearly destroyed the social and cultural diversity in Turkey. Like that, the film is also an attempt to bring the Kurdish people and the Turkish population together.
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