Very strange, I think, to sit on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon in a lecture hall at the Cape Cod Community College and watch a film about Kurdish Turkey set in the 1990, showing Kurds being killed arbitrarily, and their children forced to live on the streets of the city whose name I've never heard and can't spell. A ten year old girl and her little brother - and until she dies, an infant sister (she seems to die because a pharmacist will not let the brother have medicine because he does not have enough money). The children sell what possessions are in their tiny apartment, then they are evicted. They eventually meet other down and out people, plus a free lance prostitute. When the little girl goes (as the prostitue's little sister) to the home of a john, she wanders around, sees photos and realizes the guy is her parent's murderer. She finds his gun but does not shoot him. Instead, somehow (unexplained) flyers are made denouncing him as a murderer and are put under every door in his aparment building and spray painted on the street denouncing him as a murderer. He is outted, what becomes of him we do not see. The children have already been recruited by a Fagan-type hustler to go to Istambul where they will pick pockets.
This is a harsh film, considering the Turkish treatment of the Kurds in their Eastern provinces was probably a brave story to tell. As the woman who introduces films emphasized, this is probably all any of the audience will ever see of Kurdish Turkey and we may never know much more about their plight than this movie shows -- that they are grossly discriminated against.
3 comments:
Your film probably left you in a gloomy mood matching the weather outside your window. Such films always leave me with a sense of helplessness for their plight. Sad to know that children are living in such misery. -- barbara
Such movies are hard to watch which is not a reason to shun them. There was no tear jerking in this film, it was very matter of fact. I came home thinking that our so-called first world countries, like the US, have social services that look for kids in serious trouble. These kids stopped going to school. In the US when and 10 and 8 year old kids don't go to school someone follows up. If kids are obviously alone someone can call the police who will get the kids into some kind of shelter. I'm sure that some very needy kids fall between the cracks here, but in that movie, and probably in many developing countries, the social services are far behind other kinds of development. This made me sad.
God bless America!
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