Mar 12, 2019

On the evening of March 8, International Women's Day, thousands of women convened on Istanbul's Istiklal Avenue. Several hours prior in a makeshift theater housed in an unassuming apartment building just a few minutes away, eight films by female directors were shown to a packed room.

The screenings took place on the third day of Istanbul's first Kurdish Film Festival, celebrating Kurdish female film directors on this annual women's day. And unlike the march on Istiklal Avenue that evening, which was roughly dispersed by police using tear gas against the demonstrators, the festival went off without a hitch.

Kurdish films and their directors, however, have faced censorship and no small amount of pressure from the authorities in recent years. The festival's opening film "Bir" ("The Well") is a harrowing documentary by director Veysi Altay about the Saturday Mothers, a group of mostly Kurdish women who began assembling in Istanbul's Galatasaray Square in 1995 to demand answers to the whereabouts of their sons, who had disappeared and most likely were killed during the 1990s. The film traces the efforts of the women and their families to find the bodies of their sons, some of whom were as young as 13 when they went missing. In February, Altay was sentenced to 2½ years in prison on charges of terrorism propaganda concerning the film "Nu Jin" ("The New Woman").

“The idea [for the festival] was born about two years ago and we were just now able to do it, due to the political atmosphere and the intense pressure and censorship directed toward cinema and art,” said co-coordinator Adar Tas of the Mesopotamia Cinema Collective. Tas said that she and her colleagues hope to benefit from holding the festival just weeks prior to Turkey's upcoming local elections, on March 31, and that it would be tolerated or ignored by the authorities as a result.

Kurdish film festivals are organized in cities in the primarily Kurdish east and southeast of the country, including Diyarbakir, Van and Mardin, and the German capital of Berlin hosted its 8th Kurdish film festival last year. Doing so in Istanbul, however, has proven much more difficult.