Counter-punch: why Turkey's ban on PKK documentary North is a waste of time
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Version 0 of 1. The screening invitation reads: “Please don’t spread the news too much. Film-makers are a bit worried about Turkish authorities hearing of the screening.” The film at the centre of all this secrecy is North (original title: Bakur), which nearly brought this year’s Istanbul film festival to a standstill, and is the source of an ongoing confrontation between the Turkish government and the country’s artists. Made by the Turkish duo of film-maker Çayan Demirel and journalist Ertuğrul Mavioğlu, North is a documentary set and shot in three different Kurdish camps in southern Turkey. It’s the first time a professional camera crew has been allowed inside them, and the film aims to depict a different side to a war that has been ravaging the country for three decades. North was shot in secret; according to the directors, even their closest friends didn’t know they were working on the project. Related: Film-makers withdraw from Istanbul festival in censorship protest On 12 April, a few hours before North’s premiere at the Istanbul film festival, the organisers – the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts – announced that the Turkish ministry of culture had lodged a complaint against the screening. The film lacked a registration certificate, mandatory for all Turkish productions, and the screening had to be called off. The move caused uproar, and 23 Turkish film-makers withdrew their films from the festival in a display of solidarity. More than 100 of the country’s artists, including Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan, published an open letter accusing the government of “oppression and censorship”. The festival cancelled its closing ceremony and all competitions. So far the authorities remain unmoved; the minister of culture even tweeted that the film was propaganda for terrorism. In an effort to counter such attacks, perhaps, the film-makers staged a private screening outside the festival – hence the invitation above. So what does the film contain that caused such official hostility? North begins with footage of a few members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) playing a game in an open field. Over the course of the film’s 92 minutes, we see the residents of the three camps performing a play, singing songs, playing marbles, preparing balls of dough and engaging in other leisure activities. By focusing nearly exclusively on one aspect of the PKK members’s lives, North actually undercuts its goal of portraying its subjects as well-rounded individuals, and not the peace-violating monsters the Turkish government makes them out to be. It swings so far towards the other end of the spectrum that it becomes just as one-note as the people it seeks to counter. There are numerous scenes of PKK members cleaning their guns, but none discussing what the guns are used for. The task of “discussion” is handed over to multiple PKK figures talking to the camera in a separately filmed set of interviews – either dry history lessons, or didactic attempts to “humanise” party members. North was filmed during the summer of 2013, when the PKK and the Turkish government had reached a ceasefire agreement; the former was supposed to withdraw its troops to the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. A strong sense of melancholy emanates from some scenes, as various PKK members reflect on their fate. When they look out at the environment they have called home for decades – knowing they have to leave it soon – there’s a palpable feeling of an era coming to an end, and not in the way they had hoped for. These sequences also serve as a showcase for the film’s strong cinematography, which captures the mountains, forests, and rivers around the camps as if composing an elegy. The harshness of the surroundings is beyond doubt, but what’s also self-evident is that the PKK love this territory. North does take you to places that you probably hadn’t imagined, and, even if you had, you won’t be able to visit anytime soon. If not for the storm generated by the censorship controversy, there’s a high probability that North would have barely caused a blip on the radar. It might have received play in a couple of other regional festivals, but exhibition beyond that would have been unlikely. Yet, because of the Turkish authorities’ efforts to stifle it, the documentary has been in the spotlight all week. It’s a thoroughly unlikely example of the Streisand effect. Having become “the film the Turkish government doesn’t want you to see”, more people will hear of – and see – North than the film-makers could posssibly have hoped for. |