Synopsis
Demsala Nan (The Bread Season) takes place today in the Kurdish city of Amed (aka Diyarbakir), located within present-day eastern Turkey. Working class life is a daily struggle that places enormous pressure on the family and familiar relationships. This film follows the experiences of one such family and its members: Mahmoud, the father; Fatma, the mother, and Azad, their son, as they survive and dream of different ways of living while stuck in the open hostility of their family relationship.
Demsala Nan (The Bread Season) pivots around the daily labor each of the main characters engages in to survive and, for Azad, escape. Daily labor always maintains a state of precarity as we follow Mahmoud’s conflict with his employer over low pay and he returns home in an exceptionally foul mood triggered by this injustice. At the same time, Fatma’s employer refuses to continue giving her work over a perceived mistake on the last rug she wove, leaving her without the additional income the family needs for rent. After a failed resale of stolen books, Azad returns home to immediately find himself in an argument with Mahmoud, who sees Azad’s book hustle as a threat to the family’s imagined stability and burns all of the books in the house. All of these actions return the family to where they started at the beginning of the day and have to face another morning where survival is necessary and the dreams for a better life are less bright.
participating in Kurdish filmmaking and cultural production does not mean depicting a homogeneous 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. In order to accomplish a liberated and expansive Kurdish culture, it is important not only to share our stories with each other, but also to participate in the creation of these stories through collaborative creative work which filmmaking provides.
Welcome to Demsala Nan!
Kurdish life in Turkey is an ongoing struggle to maintain healthy, supportive, and viable lives in the face of historical and continuing cultural erasure and economic marginalization. Living conditions make it extremely difficult to contribute to a vibrant Kurdish culture through filmmaking which uses its own language and beliefs to express the conditions of life. In its continuous push for singular nationality, the Turkish government removes the ability to make and enjoy Kurdish cinema within Kurdish cities. These actions force Kurdish filmmakers to migrate to Turkish cities in order to learn and grow filmmaking careers through assimilation into the mainstream Turkish television industry. The ongoing erasure of minority cultures within Turkey and the economic oppression Kurdish people face within Turkey makes it incredibly difficult to produce a film in the Kurdish language within the Kurdish region collaborating with Kurdish cultural talent and craftspeople. As a cultural and economic project, Demsala Nan (The Bread Season) places Kurdish filmmaking practice within the Kurdish region while also activating the economic, political, and cultural relevance of filmmaking within Kurdish society.
Our Partners
This website uses cookies.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.