The 4th London Kurdish film festival was held at Rio Cinema in east London between 8th and 14th December 2006.
It featured a varied programme of over sixty films: fiction, documentary, animation, features and shorts. The festival was the first – and is now the largest – of all the Kurdish Film Festivals organised worldwide. The event was enriched by discussions with the directors, filmmakers and actors themselves. One of its main aims was to promote new talent that is emerging.
In a press release the organizers said: Our message for this year is: Without dialogue, peace is impossible. We hope that our festival will encourage peace and understanding amongst all people. We are glad to see so many young Kurdish film makers from Europe making connections with the cultural developments that are changing the face of Kurdish society back home, and their work occupies a significant space in our programme. Cinema is the language that transcends the barriers that politics, geography, religion and cultural divisions impose upon us. We need to cultivate it in order to enrich the dialogue between nationalities that live together.
It is a particular pleasure to hold our festival at the Rio Cinema, which has supported the event since its inception. We have come a long way since our first festival in 2001. The LKFF was launched by a group of volunteers who came together following an initial call from the Halkevi-Kurdish and Turkish Community Centre in Hackney.
We have grown over the years, empowered by new recruits to the organising committee, which has held constructive discussions to determine how to take the work forward to best fulfil its responsibilities. All the individuals involved in organising the film festival were aware from the beginning of the fact that the festival is organised on behalf of the largest nation in the world without a nation-state.
This is a difficult task not made easier by the fact that we lack the basic support that other nations in the world enjoy. Our discussions led us to seek to develop a structure that would be more accountable to the Kurdish people as well as making it possible to obtain more support from within the heart of the community. At the end of 2004, the LKFF decided to become a joint sub-committee of the main community centres in the UK – Halkevi Kurdish and Turkish Community Centre in Hackney, Kurdish Cultural Centre in Lambeth, Kurdish Community Centre in Haringey and Kurdish Exile Association in Kensington and Chelsea.
The fledgling Kurdish Film Industry has been very prolific since our last festival in November 2004. In recent months some of these films have managed to scoop prestigious awards at international film festivals. Filmmaking is relatively new to Kurdistan, but it has already produced some memorable works, some of which have taken the critics by storm and have achieved worldwide distribution and acclaim. As result of political developments involving the Kurds in particular, new found stability especially in South Kurdistan (Iraq) enabled activities to develop giving fresh impetus to Kurdish cinema.
Having received more films than ever this year, we had to go through a rigorous selection process to decide on our one-week programme. Sadly, we could only accomodate half of the films submitted. This year is also a year of firsts. We are particularly proud to introduce the classic silent film ZARE, made in 1926 in Armenia. This film is considered to be the first film ever made about the Kurds and we would like to thank the Armenian National Film Centre and Yerevan International Film Festival for the great efforts they have made to enable us to show this film in our festival.
And we are particularly happy to present some Kurdish animated films for the first time. These, together with other films suitable for children have given us the opportunity to present a schools/young people’s programme for the first time. Festival highlights will include: Bahman Ghobadi's HALF MOON winner of three awards at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival, the British premiere of Omer Ugur’s BACK HOME, about the military coup in Turkey in 1980, Jamil Rostami's REQUIEM OF SNOW, best foreign film contender for Iraq at the 2005 Academy Awards, Hiner Saleem’s KILOMETRE ZERO selected for the Cannes competition in 2005, Mahdi Omat’s brand new NIGHT OF MANY YEARS, Jalal Jonroy's political comedy DAVID and LAYLA, Yilmaz Arslan's recent feature FRATRICIDE, Masoud Arif Salih & Hussein Hassan Ali’s film made entirely with a Kurdish crew NARCISSUS BLOSSOM, Mano Khalil joining us with two masterful documentaries DAVID THE TOLHILDAN and AL-ANFAL, Halil Uysal and his friends honouring us with their latest film BERITAN, Karzan Sherabayani’s RETURN TO KIRKUK, Gwynne Roberts & John Williams’s SADDAM’S ROAD TO HELL and Cayan Demirel’s 38.
The festival also included many award winning short films and a diverse range of fascinating and powerful documentaries. All films had English subtitles except BERITAN. |
