Barcelona Metropolis

I talked to Alba Sotorra when she had just got back to Barcelona after a week on the road to present The End Will Be Spectacular, a Kurdish film that reconstructs the siege perpetrated by the Turkish army in the Sur district of the city of Diyarbakir, between late 2015 and early 2016. The director, Ersin Çelik, who has moved to the film world following an extensive career in journalism, portrays the resistance of the Kurdish residents of Diyarbakir, especially young women and men. The Erdogan regime in Turkey made life so impossible for the Kurds that they rose up against the regime. The response was appalling military violence during the siege: there were many casualties and wounded and the district was virtually destroyed.

Alba Sotorra has collaborated in the film’s production on account of her links with the Kurdish people. To present the film, she travelled with members of her team (Mar Garro, Andrea Vilches and Nabil Bensedick) and the Kurdish producer Diyar Esso, to San Sebastián, Bilbao, El Ferrol, Santiago de Compostela and Madrid. At the beginning of last November, having managed to premiere in Girona, Barcelona and Cambrils, the screenings in Catalonia had to be interrupted to comply with COVID-19 measures.

If the Kurds were no longer Kurds, they would have no problems in Turkey. They fight to continue to exist as Kurds. This incites state aggression, which can sometimes be especially violent, such as the siege of Diyarbakir. The clashes lasted more than 100 days, until 12 March 2016. On that day, 42 fighters perpetrated the final attacks to break the army’s siege; 35 militants gave their lives for seven people to come out alive who, with the duty of telling the story and preserving the memory of the dead, have disclosed the facts that the Erdogan regime has hidden. They are aware that the rest of the world is never sensitive enough to the suffering of the Kurdish people. What sets the film apart is that it is conceived, filmed and starring people involved in the events it recounts, even two of the seven survivors (“Haki” and “Servan the Pirate”) play themselves. The important thing is that everyone’s voice is included, the voice of the living and the dead; the script is based on the diaries of those who took part in that resistance and salvaged by those who managed to escape the siege.

It is a revolution that brewed in the war against the Islamic State’s army in which many Kurdish women, the militia of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), have actively participated under the motto: “Resistance lies in the spirit of a free woman”. This liberation struggle has spawned a revolution in Rojava: an absolutely equal political system, with no equivalence around the world and collective forms of economic organisation.

Commander Arian was surprised that I didn’t film her comrades-in-arms more. I felt the film should focus on this brave woman with a heightened awareness of the reason behind her struggle, which is also to exist, and who endured a painful recovery after being seriously wounded: resistance in the experience of extreme fragility. When I went to Rojava, when I found out about this all-female group of Kurdish militia, I had no idea what I’d do or if I could make a film about it. First of all, I had to earn their trust to live alongside them and get to know them. I succeeded, but what I filmed during the first visit didn’t interest them much, because it portrayed their day-to-day life in non-combat times, cooking, doing laundry, talking or singing, a very common pursuit amongst the Kurds. They wanted me to show them as female guerrillas and so they took me to the front, protecting me at all times.

It is not by choice. In the case of Commander Arian, the production company insisted that I express myself and I resisted. I found it superfluous because my experience is already featured in the film: without it, I couldn’t have made it. But most of all I thought my voice could steal the limelight from Commander Arian. It is a conscious decision and not at all removed from a political intent: my mission is to give a voice to others.

The interest in and beauty of making documentaries is that when you start out you don’t really know what will come of it. As you say, there are other ways of making them, but I’m less interested in them. The ones I like coincide with the fictions that unfold unexpectedly without just staging a closed pre-script. The division perhaps ought not be established between documentary and fiction, but between a standardised commercial cinema, which defines certain guidelines through a closed script, and another (I don’t know whether to say independent) that allows a territory to be explored and in which the film is an open process that can take you to places you couldn’t have imagined when it first began to take shape.

It somehow complements it, but if it has been possible it is because of the relationship I forged with the Kurdish guerrillas while filming Commander Arian. They control the camps where these women are detained and gave me access. This also says something: they do not prevent these other women – in principle their enemies – from being able to express themselves and be heard. In fact, they even listen to them. In the film, a Kurdish woman engages in the task of listening and ends up “forgiving” them. I have noticed that the Kurds do not have a vengeful attitude: existing is what matters to them. Who am I to judge them? The truth is, I didn’t expect to empathise with them so much or to feel hardly any different to them in some ways, such as feeling dissatisfied with a world fraught with injustice and inequality. Another thing is the decisions and actions they have taken in this regard.

The idea was to portray women in the Muslim world who stand out from the stereotypes – laden with prejudices – conveyed by the Western media. I affirm that this is always the idea: to show realities differently. There are five women associated with creation as a form of freedom: a Bosnian conceptual artist performing in minefields; a Turkish singer focused on her work as a lawyer to advocate human rights; an Iranian filmmaker with the courage to address taboo subjects in her country, such as drug addiction and prostitution; an Afghan woman who, in the Taliban era, cultivated the only art allowed: poetry (and in privacy); and a Pakistani dancer who had to leave her country when dancing was banned. Women also star in Commander Arian and The Return, and my next film will be about Francesca Llopis, but the other films I’ve made (Game Over and Qatar: The Race) have a strong male presence. In Qatar: The Race (2011), I addressed the country’s contradictions with the fastest growing economy on the planet by way of three interrelated men: a Qatari man who made his fortune camel racing, a Sudanese immigrant and an engineer from northern Catalonia. The more you succeed in the system, the more its alienation grabs you. One of the things I explore in my films is the impact of the capitalist, consumerist and patriarchal economic system on people.

And war is very different to how he had imagined as a child playing with toy weapons. In war he sees that there are real people in the line of fire whom he could kill. He filmed himself feeling this uneasiness, and I had the material recorded by Djalal himself. When he returns from Afghanistan, he doesn’t know what to do with his life, as is the case with many young people today. Djalal, from a middle-class family, undergoes a crisis that stems from following a model: the values of a man as a fighter who, as if it were also a triumph, sees himself with a house and a car. I present him without judging the person.

It’s a testosterone thing, although the Kurdish men in Rojava have done a critical job of shedding patriarchal and sexist values. In any case, the fact is that women experienced victories and war itself differently.

Yes, it will be called Francesca and Love. It will also call into question what society determines you should be, in this case in relation to a woman after a certain age, when your body is no longer that of a young person and has allegedly ceased to be attractive, so she is forced to give up certain things. What Francesca does is rebel. On the other hand, I’m excited to be shooting in Barcelona for the first time, and I plan to pay tribute to the city.

I have lived here before at different times in my life. The first time was when I was 18, after spending the previous year studying in New York. It was just before I went to university. It is true that the ESCAC was already up and running and there were studies in Audiovisual Communication at UPF, and also at other universities in Barcelona, but I decided to study at the Complutense University of Madrid. There I had the opportunity to find out how the film industry worked because the university had contacts for internships, and I also realised that I didn’t want to make industrial films. The last year of my degree, I did it at a university in Puerto Rico, which works in the same way as the United States. When I finished, I hitchhiked for a year to Pakistan and Unveiled Views is the product of that experience.

These studies were very interesting. Above all, the master’s afforded me knowledge of the Mediterranean world. Then, I moved back to Barcelona. I later resided in Berlin while continuing to travel the world. Returning to Barcelona is tied in with the fact that, while presenting my first films at international festivals, I met people from the Catalan audiovisual world, such as Marta Figueres, who has become my co-producer.

It’s amazing how it’s associated with football. Barça is renowned in the most remote places. More recently, you are asked about the political situation in Catalonia. Especially in the case of the Kurds, who consider us their comrades-in-arms. Actually, I think their conditions are much harsher than ours. The fact is that they are acutely aware of us. Much more than we are of them.