Demsala Nan (the Bread Season)

Demsala Nan (the Bread Season) successfully places Kurdish filmmaking practice within the Kurdish region while also activating filmmaking’s economic, political and cultural relevance within Kurdish society. This film energizes a new movement in Kurdish filmmaking by centering Kurdish as the film’s primary language. The use of the Kurdish language is the first step towards producing a Kurdish cinema with its specific cultural, political and economic characteristics. As Kurdish filmmakers, we see this as a fundamental right and necessity in resisting cultural subjugation and erasure. For us, cinema is intended for communities to express their stories first to themselves and then to the rest of the world. 

Demsala Nan (the Bread Season) also acts as a corrective to the recent history of Kurdish cinema, which often models itself on Hollywood production values and uncritical populist stories. By locating our film in Amed (Diyarbakir), one of Turkey’s major metropolitan Kurdish cities, we can express the historical significance of political struggle in this city, which recent Kurdish films do not explore or depict. Diyarbakir has experienced some of the most intense forms of suppression and political struggle within Kurdistan, making filmmaking here difficult and dangerous as films such as ours goes against Turkish state policies. Our film aims to reveal the urban class conflicts along with the cultural and linguistic conflicts within Diyarbakir. We honor those who continue to resist and make Kurdish culture under extreme conditions and energize a new movement of Kurdish storytelling through cinema. 

We are excited to bring our community and global audiences a story of Kurdish life that strives toward an authentic representation based upon community-developed ethics, philosophy, mythology, and cultural expressions of Kurdish society. These foundational values inform our aim to present a new form of Kurdish cinema that is suitable to the current conditions of Kurdistan and impactful in the daily lives of Kurdish people. By basing our production in the Kurdish community we hope to restore hope for the growth of Kurdish culture, and especially for the future of filmmaking within Kurdish cities and communities. Working locally invites filmmakers to think and develop their works within the location’s specific historical and political boundaries. 

During the filmmaking process, we were drawn to the stark reality that filmmaking in Diyarbakir was rarely experienced by its inhabitants. One result of this was the outpouring of support and appreciation by the citizens of the city, who gave their time and energy to our project without expectations. Our people are hungry to participate in collaborative cultural production, such as filmmaking. Bringing filmmaking back to Kurdish cities is essential to growing Kurdish culture everywhere and correcting decades-long misrepresentation of Kurdish life by Western cinema. 

Finally, participating in Kurdish filmmaking and cultural production does not mean depicting a homogenous Kurdish society. For our culture to grow and enrich, it is essential that our communities can hold up a mirror and explore inter-community issues that span the categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality. These categories not only do the work of social structuring today, but they are vessels with which to dream and explore future possibilities for the Kurdish people. To accomplish a liberated and expansive Kurdish culture, it is important to not only share our stories with each other but also to participate in creating these stories through collaborative creative work, which filmmaking provides.