A Decolonial Reading of Kurdish Cinema

Engin Sustam writes essays steeped in critical reflection, tracing the path of Kurdish cinema in its relationship to memory and identity beyond the framework of place and state. The text carries the reader from the reality of political deprivation into the spaces of the diaspora, where Kurdish festivals in Europe turn into platforms of collective expression and resistance to forgetting. Here the idea of mobile memory and memory without a homeland emerges, as the Kurds, through film, reformulate their cultural and historical existence away from the colonial narratives that sought to marginalize them. The essay advances with intellectual scenes that reveal the role of cinema in representing the experience of a scattered community, combining the cruelty of uprooting with the desire for cultural revival. In films and festivals, longing is embodied, and lost geography is recovered through images, while the cinematic screening becomes a symbolic act of resistance that affirms a presence that cannot be erased. Thus Sustam shows that Kurdish cinema is not merely an artistic practice, but a living testimony to a collective struggle for recognition and memory. This book is not merely a critical reading, but an attempt to illuminate a cinema that rescues its memory from loss and establishes a presence that transcends the limits of geography and politics. It is a meditation on what it means for a nation to remain standing in images and narratives, even when its existence is denied on the ground.