NRecently I went to the cinema and watched Mano Khalil’s “Neighbors”. Of course, the film was shown in a small, fine arthouse cinema, where films of this kind are usually shown. There was no popcorn, but the movie, I knew, wasn’t a popcorn movie anyway. Kurdish cinema can sometimes be very funny (mostly funny in the tragicomic way), but popcorn cinema is never. And so it happened. I had hardly read anything about the film beforehand, only heard that it was probably based on Mano Khalil’s own memories and that it was set in a village in Syria right on the Turkish border in the 1980s.
The film then was a shock. Everything in it was known to me. I either knew it from my own memories (from the landscape to the curtains in the family living room, which were identical to the curtains in my grandparents’ house), or I knew it from stories my father told for years. It is true that the film family was a Muslim-Kurdish family and not a Yazidi-Kurdish one like mine. But back in the 1980s, things weren’t particularly religious in north-eastern Syria anyway (most of the time the imam with his tinny voice is just laughed at).
Hafez al-Assad story hour
I also knew everything else from stories: how the children played tricks with the mines from the border strip. Village life: The electricity pylons have already been built, but electricity is far from available. How the secret service harassed people, abducted them, and after weeks, tortured them and half-dead, tossed them in the dust. How the teacher, a convinced Baathist, beats the Arabic language into the Kurdish children with a baton. The school lessons, which mainly consist of flag roll-call, Hafez al-Assad story time and anti-Semitic propaganda (“the united Arab world against the child murderer Israel”).
Of course there was a whole range of other things at stake, the unfulfilled love between the Kurdish Aram and the daughter of the neighboring Jewish family Hannah, Aunt Sawda and her choleric husband, Sero’s desire for a television so that she could finally watch cartoons (spoilers : He also gets the television, only there are no cartoons, instead the same face of Hafez al-Assad in one of the same Hafez al-Assad propaganda films).
I left the cinema with a mixture of anger, tears and questions. It is the first time that I see this story, which is also the story of my family, on a screen.
What nationalism does
I grew up with Kurdish cinema, with films by Yilmaz Güney and Bahman Ghobadi – Kurdish directors who, like Mano Khalil in their films, tell Kurdish stories about Kurdish people. One could also say: invisible stories of invisible people, if you only think about what a excitement a white “Kurdistan” lettering on a green meadow (overlay of the place) and a few Kurdish spoken words in Yilmaz Güney’s film “Yol – Der Weg “ trigger. It was nothing short of a revolution. After all, the Kurdish language was banned in Turkey at the time.
In Mano Khalil’s “Neighbors” there is a scene where Sero’s family meets again after a long time at the Turkish-Syrian border – his maternal grandparents live on the other side. But no sooner have they greeted each other than the soldiers on both sides are yelling at them – the Turkish soldiers are yelling that they should speak Turkish, the Syrian soldiers are yelling that they should speak Arabic to each other. And because the family can only communicate in Kurdish, their meeting is violently broken up. To reduce this film to its identity-political potential does not go far enough. Mano Khalil also talks about what nationalism, socialist indoctrination and anti-Semitic incitement do to the lives of individuals. The characters are not mere representatives, they are people whose lives are caught between the millstones of dictatorship. The violence in this film about the 80’s is perpetuated in the violence of today.
In a world where being Kurdish is always a political issue, the filmmakers become the plaintiffs, the film the court – who are we, how did we become that, and what is it?
Recently, when I see the reports on the protests in Iran, especially in the Kurdish areas, I often have to think of Bahman Ghobadi’s films. Especially his film “Halfmoon” from 2006, in which a terminally ill Kurdish singer from Iran makes his way to Erbil to play his last concert there. He comes to a village where 1334 banned Kurdish singers live who are not allowed to sing in Iran. The women stand on the roofs, squares and walls with their huge daf drums and sing. What a force! It’s the same call for freedom that’s on the streets today.
