In the documentary film CLOSEUPKURDISTAN the Kurdish director Yüksel Yavuz creates a connection between his personal story of immigration and the current situation of the TurkishKurdish 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.
"In 1996, I was staying in the village of Mankien in South Sudan to film the war which was taking place. At the time, I thought that making a film about an area struggling with such a severe conflict would almost have to be an act of duty. Once there, the reality appeared completely different from what I initially imagined it would be. The war that was all around me was not only a struggle between an oppressive government and a downtrodden minority but a latent conflict driven by power and economic interests. Back in Belgium, I felt overwhelmed by a strong feeling of helplessness and disillusionment to the point of never showing these images, up to now. A short while ago, I was told that the village of Mankien had been subjected to a massacre orchestrated by the Khartoum government with more than the slight complicity of Western oil companies. Closed District is not only a film about the war in South Sudan, but more about wars in general, about the death and distress that often ensues. It also raises the question of the filmmaker's place in a situation of conflict". (Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd)
UntitledClose to God / Far from Home (somewhere in between pop and classical) is a portrait of a place and a state stuck in between, surrounded by barriers. Close to God / Far from Home is High Class Salon and it's owner; Palestine's loneliest lover Tony, hair-dresser and choir-boy. Mr Tony is a proud decendant of Italian 13th century cruisaders and a natural born germanophile. Mr Jaber is also the sexiest man in Bethlehem, forever faithful to Jesus Christ, Richard Clayderman and Kaiser Franz Joseph to whom he built a temple, an altar, a home.
Testimonies of women sentenced to prison, victims of domestic violence.
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Infiltrating videoclubs.The Zulú and Clear and Present Danger trailers are part of Nascimento/Lovera's edits-inserts video project. By inserting their re-edited versions of commercial films in rental video chain stores, inter-city buses, public television and the black market, they are able to anonymously maximise the distribution of their work, while also questioning the symbolic mechanisms of power which are no longer located in traditional centres of cultural production, but spread throughout everywhere.
Syrian director Anmar al-Beik uses a series of imaginative artifices to approach a small monastic community that seeks to experience Islamic-Christian dialogue.
June 2013. A group of 800 people illegally occupy a former movie theatre in Barcelona in order to screen a documentary. Once they are in, they rename the building after a girl who committed suicide in 2011. It becomes ‘Cinema Patricia Heras’. Who was Patricia? Why did she kill herself? And above all, what role did Barcelona play in her death? That is precisely what this documentary and the strongly symbolic squatting action seeks to bring to light: through Patricia’s story, they reveal the dark side of Barcelona: The Dead City.
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