The memory wave that has been impacting social sciences also resonates in the field of Kurdish studies. As my fellow scholars increasingly focus on the rights' movement and seek justice for Kurds, I aim to explore the relationality between the Turkish state violence against Kurds and the counter-resistance practices through (collective) memory.
I suggest that there is a direct relationship between the multifaceted Kurdish Cinema, justice, memory, and resistance against systemic state violence. In fact, it is no coincidence that the young film-makers, who were engaged in the Mesopotamian Cultural Center and formed a cinema collective there in the early 1990s, challenged the Turkish state's narrative of "terrorist Kurds" and its claim for reality and truth by making documentaries. That is why I would like to focus on the multipurpose structure of Kurdish films and how they confronted the state's claims while mass atrocities were taking place in the 1990s.
Practices of gendered violence of both the Turkish state and state-founded paramilitary organizations have been on the agenda of Kurdish films since the late 1990s. Thus, film-making appears to be a hub for resistance and reflecting upon Kurdish realities and experiences of systematic violence and oppression. On the one hand, a visual pool for individual and collective experiences is created by making films, and on the other film-making manifests itself as resistance. As human rights' violations and losses are recorded through these films, anyone who has been under a great deal of trouble while making these becomes an important agent and right defender. In short, Kurdish films and film-making are both the founding subjects and the bearers of Kurdish collective memory.
In this research paper, my aim is to contextually analyze the socio-political background of Kurdish films from a feminist perspective. Thus, this analysis will provide us with an understanding of how the Turkish state created its discriminatory grand narrative against Kurds and how Kurds encountered it with multifaced individual and collective resistance practices through film-making. I believe, Kurdish films that seek justice, demand rights, and emphasize the political subjectivities of Kurdish people, play an important role to trace both individual and collective traumas caused by state violence. Finally, considering the topics that are covered in these films, Kurdish cinema has the potential to contribute to peace-building in Turkey.
