Selen Vargün Alıtkan | hidn, IDPs, Internal migration, Ethnicity, Humanities, Middle East, MENA Region

This paper examines the potentials and theoretical interpretations of minority filmmaking through the particular case of Kurdish cinema produced in Turkey. Kurdish cinema, categorised as such since the 2000s, is an international cinema that emerges from multiple geographic spaces, although it is concentrated in countries with Kurdish populations, such as Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia and European countries such as England, Germany, Sweden and Norway. In this paper, I focus on Kurdish filmmaking produced specifically in Turkey and evaluate the dynamics of the emergence of a stateless Kurdish cinema, which produces films that contrast with Turkish national cinema and Turkish national identity. With respect to Hayden White’s formulations on narrative and history and Gilles Deleuze’s theories about minority filmmaking and the time-image, I argue that the concept of time in Kurdish cinema exceeds the time of the narrative and carries an archival potential for the unrepresented history of Kurdish life in Turkey, in this way blurring the line between documentary and fiction or narrative and “history”. In order to explain the backdrop to this argument, I will first articulate the emergence of Kurdish cinema in international arenas and in Turkey. Then, I will analyse two Kurdish feature films made in Turkey: İki Dil Bir Bavul (On the Way to School, 2009) by Özgür Doğan and Orhan Eskiköy and Min Dit (The Children of Diyarbakır, 2009) by Miraz Bezar in terms of how they play with the notions of fiction and documentary, as well as narrative and history.

As a woman of Turkish origin born in Turkey, I cannot remember how old I was when I first realised that I had a national identity. It was certainly not early in my life or during my elementary school years. It did not emerge at Turkish national festivals during those times when we were all joyful about something, but we were not perfectly aware that this joy should be about the existence of our republic. It was also not during my high school years when we were all following the principles of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, due to an education that imprinted a post-coup-d’etat military ideology onto young minds. Actually, it was only after I moved to the metropolis of Istanbul from Kocaeli (a relatively small city that is close to Istanbul), that I realised there were people who had different beliefs to mine. Thus, my idea of national identity was questioned and challenged when I interacted with the diverse identities living in Istanbul, who were not mentioned in the official history classes or the textbooks we were taught during high school or university.[1]

=KTML_Link_External_Begin=https://www.kurdipedia.org/docviewer.aspx?id=572330&document=0001.PDF=KTML_Link_External_Between=Click to read The Fictive Archive: Kurdish Filmmaking in Turkey=KTML_Link_External_End=