The eight-year-old Mohamed: Kurdistan's filmic future?
I’ve just spent three weeks in a village of 600 people in northern Iraq. Goptapa, which looks north-eastwards towards Turkey and Iran, is on a hilltop lined with goat paths. When there aren’t dust storms you can look down onto a vast oxbow lake valley whose river snakes to the Tigris and Mesopotamia. The villagers grow pomegranates and keep geese, goats and cows. About 100 of them were gassed in Saddam’s Anfal operation in the late 1980s. There’s a new school, and a little mosque. For three nights, I made a cinema there out of sparkly fabric, the first time there had been one in the area. I gave the kids in the village little high-definition video cameras to make movies. They queued up to use them. One of the eight-year-old boys made a beautiful four-minute film. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. Here’s what I want to say:
Dear Mohamed
I’m back home, in a place called Edinburgh, in Scotland, in Europe. The air is chilly here, the sky is grey, silver and blue this morning, like a mackerel. I walked around your village at 7am on my last morning, but your gates were shut and I didn’t want to wake you. I need to tell you something, my friend. You have great potential. When you first took our camera, your footage was wobbly and nothing special. But then you crouched down, held the camera steady, and filmed that wee boy sitting beside the irrigation channel in your father’s farm. I heard you tell him to play with the mud. Then you whispered, “He’s building a house in his head.
He’s giving his dreams to the mud.” This touched my translator and me a lot because in those few short minutes you did what the best documentary film-makers in the world do. You used your camera to film another person’s thoughts.
Perhaps in 20 years’ time, Kurdistan will be united and sovereign, but whether it is or whether Goptapa stays part of Iraq, the iniquities inflicted on, and the ethnic and religious enmity within, your country can be worn down by the kind of empathy you showed. The American philosopher Richard Rorty said that revolutions redescribe the world. Few places on our planet need redescribing more than Iraq because for most of us the name of your country conjures images of war. When you grow up, you must conjure different images with your camera.
But how are you to make films? The Kurdistan regional government has a culture ministry and a film commissioner, and has started to part-fund feature films. In Erbil recently Shawkat Korki, an Iraqi Kurd who was brought up in Iran, showed me his film Crossing the Dust, which was funded by the KRG and has been shown at more than 50 film festivals. It’s about an Arab boy your age who gets separated from his parents on the day that Saddam’s statue in Baghdad was toppled, and is looked after by two Peshmerga Kurds. It’s very good. The most famous Kurdish film-maker of the moment, Bahman Ghobadi, who made the gorgeous Turtles Can Fly, is godfathering young Kurdish directors, and somehow I will try to introduce him to you.
The best Kurdish director whose work I know is Yilmaz Güney, who made Yol and The Wall in the 1980s (Yol was directed for him by a friend while he was in prison), and had been an actor from the 1960s. He had to make his films in Turkish, but when you are older you must see his work because it is part of your heritage. So Kurdish film has a history and production methods—though you can take inspiration from films made anywhere in the world. I loved the fact that when I showed you the French film The Red Balloon last week, you reached up into the air at the end to try to catch hold of the balloons that were carrying the boy up into the sky, as if they were real. You told me that you wanted “to be two pigeons” when you grow up, and that you want “to fly slowly” over Goptapa.
When I asked you about who you love and why, you answered by talking about the men who protect your village from the enemy. It dispirited me to see how militarised your thoughts are. Are there guns in your dreams? I suppose so. I noticed that when we filmed with one of your friends recently, he had a gun in one hand and a dove in the other.
If the documentary that I’m making about you gets into a major film festival, I’ll contact your family to see if you can travel to the screening. And perhaps I can return to Goptapa to show it in the village? I don’t know when we will meet again, but I am looking at your face now, in the edit suite.
Mark Cousins’s documentary, “The First Movie,” is released in the UK on 1st October. Click here for more information.
I’ve just spent three weeks in a village of 600 people in northern Iraq. Goptapa, which looks north-eastwards towards Turkey and Iran, is on a hilltop lined with goat paths. When there aren’t dust storms you can look down onto a vast oxbow lake valley whose river snakes to the Tigris and Mesopotamia. The villagers grow pomegranates and keep geese, goats and cows. About 100 of them were gassed in Saddam’s Anfal operation in the late 1980s. There’s a new school, and a little mosque. For three nights, I made a cinema there out of sparkly fabric, the first time there had been one in the area. I gave the kids in the village little high-definition video cameras to make movies. They queued up to use them. One of the eight-year-old boys made a beautiful four-minute film. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. Here’s what I want to say:
Dear Mohamed
I’m back home, in a place called Edinburgh, in Scotland, in Europe. The air is chilly here, the sky is grey, silver and blue this morning, like a mackerel. I walked around your village at 7am on my last morning, but your gates were shut and I didn’t want to wake you. I need to tell you something, my friend. You have great potential. When you first took our camera, your footage was wobbly and nothing special. But then you crouched down, held the camera steady, and filmed that wee boy sitting beside the irrigation channel in your father’s farm. I heard you tell him to play with the mud. Then you whispered, “He’s building a house in his head.
He’s giving his dreams to the mud.” This touched my translator and me a lot because in those few short minutes you did what the best documentary film-makers in the world do. You used your camera to film another person’s thoughts.
Perhaps in 20 years’ time, Kurdistan will be united and sovereign, but whether it is or whether Goptapa stays part of Iraq, the iniquities inflicted on, and the ethnic and religious enmity within, your country can be worn down by the kind of empathy you showed. The American philosopher Richard Rorty said that revolutions redescribe the world. Few places on our planet need redescribing more than Iraq because for most of us the name of your country conjures images of war. When you grow up, you must conjure different images with your camera.
But how are you to make films? The Kurdistan regional government has a culture ministry and a film commissioner, and has started to part-fund feature films. In Erbil recently Shawkat Korki, an Iraqi Kurd who was brought up in Iran, showed me his film Crossing the Dust, which was funded by the KRG and has been shown at more than 50 film festivals. It’s about an Arab boy your age who gets separated from his parents on the day that Saddam’s statue in Baghdad was toppled, and is looked after by two Peshmerga Kurds. It’s very good. The most famous Kurdish film-maker of the moment, Bahman Ghobadi, who made the gorgeous Turtles Can Fly, is godfathering young Kurdish directors, and somehow I will try to introduce him to you.
The best Kurdish director whose work I know is Yilmaz Güney, who made Yol and The Wall in the 1980s (Yol was directed for him by a friend while he was in prison), and had been an actor from the 1960s. He had to make his films in Turkish, but when you are older you must see his work because it is part of your heritage. So Kurdish film has a history and production methods—though you can take inspiration from films made anywhere in the world. I loved the fact that when I showed you the French film The Red Balloon last week, you reached up into the air at the end to try to catch hold of the balloons that were carrying the boy up into the sky, as if they were real. You told me that you wanted “to be two pigeons” when you grow up, and that you want “to fly slowly” over Goptapa.
When I asked you about who you love and why, you answered by talking about the men who protect your village from the enemy. It dispirited me to see how militarised your thoughts are. Are there guns in your dreams? I suppose so. I noticed that when we filmed with one of your friends recently, he had a gun in one hand and a dove in the other.
If the documentary that I’m making about you gets into a major film festival, I’ll contact your family to see if you can travel to the screening. And perhaps I can return to Goptapa to show it in the village? I don’t know when we will meet again, but I am looking at your face now, in the edit suite.
Mark Cousins’s documentary, “The First Movie,” is released in the UK on 1st October. Click here for more information.
