We spoke to filmmakers Doug Aubrey and Peri Ibrahim just before the UK premier screening of Kurdi. It was to be a controversial screening – a Q&A afterwards was heated, raising questions of violence, identity and politics.
Has this film changed your life?
Peri: Of course it has. Every day my life is changing. Since I’ve been in Glasgow, Glasgow has changed. From day one, when I arrived 20 years ago, it’s been a welcoming city – but since 2000, when more asylum seekers began to arrive, I think it became more ignorant. There was no education as to who these new people were.
Before 7/7 I was 100% Glaswegian. But since that day, I’ve been treated differently, and called names in my home town.
Kurdi tells the tale of Peri’s journey from his Glasgow flat, wife and two daughters, back to Halabja, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where Saddam Hussein’s forces killed thousands in a poison gas attack. It was filmed over five years – and shows a moving, at times difficult, journey.
What is the importance of this film to you?
Doug: We started making this film two days before the war in Iraq began. I think we’ve lost sight of what’s happening. That war has now been going on for longer than the Second World War – who would have thought that?
There’s a responsibility that lies with people working in the media – the fact that we have two members of the BNP in the European Parliament shows that something has gone wrong in this country.
Kurdi was made on a shoestring budget over a five-year period, with Doug following Peri into some of the most dangerous parts of Iraq, Turkey and the Lebanon. At one point, they visit an old training camp for Kurdish Peshmarga (or freedom fighters), and must move quickly for fear of snipers from various factions roaming the hills around it.
Was this film worth the danger and hardship it took to make it?
Doug: We thought in filming, did what we were doing make Peri change… but this was about the responsibility of filmmaking. It’s about the monitoring of power.
And because it’s a personal story you get a whole lot more from that than you do from a John Simpson report, or from a Wikipedia search on Kurdistan.
Peri: I’ve got two different generations before me who were involved in the same struggle, and they were my relatives, my father, and my grandfather. It is strange to see yourself on screen in this way, because I see myself as the filmmaker, not as the subject.
But it’s a story that needs to be told.
Kurdi will be screened at the London Kurdish Film Festival in October. For more details go to www.autonomi.tv
