Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

vie culturelle
PASSION
novo 1984
Yilmaz Güney, Turkish Humanist
Some five thousand Turks and
Kurds from all over Europe -
accompanied -by their Parisian
friends - marched 'silently through the
streets of the capital on September 12 to
the Père Lachaise cemetery to paya last
homage and farewell to their compatriot,
Yilmaz Güney, the world-renowned movie-maker
who died of cancer in his Paris
~xile at the age of 47.
Güney was best known for his hard-
'hitting films about peasant life and strug-
:gles - including The Herd and The Way
:{Yolj. The latter was crowned with the
.Palme d'Or at the 1982 Cannes Festival.
Güney's last film - The Wall, made in-a
suburb of Paris a year and a half ago -
was also his most excruciating. It deals
with 1he cruel realit'j' of torture in a children's
prison.
Güney, the quintessence of the "committed
artist," never concealed, in his
films or his life, his views and ideals, his
vision of a genuinely socialist and independent
Turkey. For this very reason, he
frequently found himself behind bars.
Güney was imprisoned for the first
time in 1961 on the stereotyped but deadly
charge of spreading "communist propaganda"
- punishment for the political
implications of his first published short
story. In 1972, he was sentenced again -
this time for "giving shelter to revolutionaries."
Released in 1974 as a result of a
general amnesty proclaimed by a more
liberal (15utshort-lived) government, he
was arrested three months later and sentenced
to 24 years imprisonment - on
the unproven accusation of killing a judge
in a tavern brawl.
Born' of poor Kurdish peasants in the
south of Turkey, Güney skillfully depicted
in his films the patriarchal prejudices and
frustrated aspirations of the common
people of !he countryside, the tyranny of
poverty and the despotism of an omnipresent
police state.
During the Sixties, Güney became Tur-
key's most popular actor, playing in one
adventure-type film after another. Para-,
doxically, it was not until his years of:
imprisonment in the Seventies that he'
became a director, writing scenarios for
serious films of social criticism and giving
detailed instructions to the members of a
movie teaM who came constantly to visit
him in his c'3li. The Herdwas made entirely
under such circumstances, and Yol
was started in this way - but was completed
in Switzerland after Güney escaped
from prison and managed to slip out]
of the country ill October 1981.
Î
In exile, Güney never ceased to bel
preoccupied with the problems of Turkey.j
It was typical of the man that in an inter-!
view with this reporter a year ago insistedl
on talking at length about the political
oppression raging in Turkey before discussing
himself and his work. While in
France, he issued appeal after appeal to
public opinion concerning the denial of
human rights by the Ankara regime.
Schofield Coryell •
Télérama
novo 1984
Terno, musicien kurde. Le Kurdistan est le berceau de
l'une des plus anciennes civilisations du monde, qui rem"onte
à l'empire des Mèdes (Vile s. avant J.-C.). Peuplé
. aujourd'hui de vingt millions d'êtres humains, il est aussi le
lieu des plus gros gisements pétrolifères du Moyen-Orient...
Ne cherchez pas sur votre atlas: le. Kurdistan n'existe pas!
Les trois cent mille habitants de la petite île de Malte, eux,
jouissent d'un siège à l'Onu, mais les millions de Kurdes, on
ne connait pas! On leur interdit de parler leur langue, on
leur interdit de chanter ou de danser, on les écrase, on les
massacre, au nez et à la barbe de l'humanité. Comme les
peaux-rouges, comme 'les aborigènes d'Australie, comme
'les Cambodgiens ...
Partagés entre l'Irak, l'Iran, la Syrie et la Turquie, les kurdes
défendent leur identité avec le fusil. Ceux qui sont exilés se
défendent aussi, quelquefois avec le chant et la poésie,
témoin Ezzadin Temo, le barde kurde bien connu chez nous
par ses concerts et ses disques. Comment peut-on résister
à tant de chaleur dans le chant et.à cet ensorcellement de
la danse? .Alain Swietlik FranceMusique 19 h 5
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