Taking precarity as a force and surveying on the past through film: Can films recuperate the untold histories?

Abstract

The meeting of film and history sits at a position where it becomes hard to distinguish their interdependent dynamics. Accordingly, how do film and history connect, work with or work against each other? What is the significance of film for constructing histories of the people whose past, identity and culture were denied for long years? Where does this bring or drive film towards becoming a medium through which precarious politics on diverse people are revealed, documented and archived? Leaning on these, in this article, I will interrogate the position of transnational Kurdish cinema produced in Turkey for transforming the precarious political realms into a creative force that exposes different Kurdish histories, memories and temporalities. To do this I will make use of the interviews I conducted with Kurdish filmmakers in Turkey between 2010 and 2016, including Hüseyin Karabey, Mizgin Müjde Arslan, and Zeynel Doğan, and their films which reveal the tensions they inherit from their ancestors.