This year, the Pusan International Film Festival is hosting its first-ever Kurdish Film Programme
with a powerful line-up of films by Kurdish directors and I was asked to write an introduction
about Kurdish cinema for the Programme. Considering the fact that the Kurds have no nation-state
and, as a result, have no unified national cinema – having neither the infrastructure nor the relevant
institutions needed to sustain a film industry – in many ways it feels like there is actually not very
much to mention about the “history” of Kurdish cinema. It’s also very hard to know where or even
how to start such a history. The difficulties of Kurdish cinema are completely related to the
political, economic, social and cultural conditions of the Kurds and it would, in turn, be wholly
misleading to try to fit the more recent wave of Kurdish film and filmmakers into a classic
definition or understanding of national cinema because of these unique conditions. So I think a
short introduction answering two basic questions – Who are the Kurds? and Where is Kurdistan? –
will make it easier to understand the complex issues surrounding this particular cinema, a cinema
that includes so many Kurdish filmmakers passionately making films and winning prestigious
awards around the world at international festivals like Pusan.
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