MONTREAL, Canada - The life of a young female fighter, who was killed at the age of 25 in clashes, is the main focus of a documentary film aimed at understanding the motives that led many young Diaspora Kurds to join the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the 1990s.
“Gulistan was a young woman I met when I immigrated to Canada,” explains 27-year-old Montreal-based Kurdish filmmaker Zayne Akyol, about the character of her film. “I was five years old; she was about 18. Her brother went to Turkey before her to fight with the PKK. To Gulistan, he was an idol. She had been in Quebec for a year, and the idea sprouted in her mind to join her brother.”
In Land of Roses: My name is Gulistan, Akyol hopes to tell Gulistan’s long journey from Canada back to the mountains of Kurdistan to join the fight for her people.
For Akyol this is not only a film about the role of women in the Kurdish struggle in Turkey, but a journey down memory lane. Akyol was a young girl when she arrived in Canada; it was Gulistan who took her under her wing.
“We used to live in the same building. She used to babysit me and often I went to see her. I considered her like my older sister,’’ Akyol told Rudaw. “She used to talk to me about things I would not necessarily understand, about Kurds and also about Communism.”
Akyol and Gulistan were more than two Kurdish girls ending up in Montreal: They were both Alevis born in the same village.
Akyol says that Kurds in Turkey rallied behind the PKK in great numbers as the group fought for Kurdish political, cultural and economic rights. And, she says, leaders touring Kurdish communities abroad to tell them of the struggle back home helped to recruit many like Gulistan to join the front.
“Many young Kurds in the nineties went to Germany to integrate training camps, just as Gulistan did,” says Akyol. “While some dropped the idea of going to Turkey, others continued their journey. Gulistan went to Turkey, and reached northern Iraq through the eastern side of Turkey. This is how she engaged in her life as a fighter.”
Gulistan was killed in 2000 in clashes with Peshmargas from Iraqi Kurdistan, during the fight between the PKK and Kurdish groups on the Iraqi side. But before long, Akyol started to write the script for a film that would depict the life of her former roommate, friend and mentor.
“One day, Gulistan disappeared from my life,” says Akyol. “In 2000, when I was 13 years old, I heard Gulistan had died at the border of Turkey and Iraq in an attack by the Peshmarga against the PKK. Since then, she stayed in mind.”
When Akyol started looking for financial support for her film, most of those she approached did not have faith that she could carry out such a “complex and ambitious” project.
“When I started the script at 23 years old, I said I wanted to go see the PKK in the mountains,” she recalls. “The financial institutions I approached in Canada to fund the project didn’t trust me. Even my relatives hardly believed me. There was always a slight suspicion.”
However, she dispelled everyone’s doubt by traveling to the Kurdistan Region, Turkey and Germany, gaining the trust of the PKK, Gulistan’s relatives and successfully conducting much of the research needed for her film.
“In the summer of 2011, I went to Iraq and Turkey,” she says. “I shot with my director of photography and my sound recordist. We shot for the purposes of research, but also to prove to the financial institutions that I had access to the PKK, as I had said.”
Akyol’s persistence paid off. Official institutions in Canada and Europe opened their coffers to her and she benefited from two subsidies in screenwriting from SODEC, an institution dedicated to supporting cultural entrepreneurship in Quebec.
Her project now has a funding of $350,000, including the partnership of the National Film Board of Canada. But Akyol says she needs more money, another $200,000, to fulfill this dream.
“It is a very small budget for a documentary feature film involving three countries,” Akyol explains.
Once the project takes off, Akyol will travel with her technical team and producers to Germany, Turkey and Iraq to find out what happened to Gulistan, and understand the reasons that led Gulistan and so many other young Kurds going back to Turkey to enlist in the PKK in the nineties.
She has already found Sozdar, a female PKK fighter who will play the role of Gulistan. Sozdar herself has grown up inside the group since the age of nine.
“I intend to stay for a substantial period of time in the mountains with the PKK, between four to six weeks. We will adapt to the way of living there, just like we did last time,” says Akyol.
She adds that she had to cut short her first trip in 2011 because of Turkish airstrikes against the PKK. But this time around, she hopes to get what she needs, thanks to a peace agreement between the group and Ankara.
“My idea is not to talk about politics, although it is inevitable because this is the path Gulistan chose,” says Akyol of her plan. “I attempt to understand why Gulistan made it, and how she made it, who she met, and what the Kurdish identity meant for her, what it means for other female fighters and other persons with whom she lived.”
In Land of Roses, Akyol also aims to tell the world about the Kurds and who they are.
“It will give visibility to the Kurdish community that people don’t know about,” she says. “We hear bout Palestine; everybody you will meet on the street will have an opinion about Palestine. But nobody knows about the Kurds.”
