North American Premiere • Grand Prize Competition

Yüksel Yavuz creates a connection between his personal story of immigration and the current situation of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. In the film he makes a personal journey, which takes him from Hamburg through Stockholm to Turkey, ending in the refugee camp Maxmur in Iraqi Kurdistan. Throughout this journey he meets among others his parents and old friends, some of whom went to the mountains to become guerrilla fighters, others who fled the country and went into exile. The rest, which were forced to stay in the homeland villages, were persecuted and murdered, because they fought for justice and cultural freedom, which still doesn’t exist in Turkey. The film is also an attempt to bring the Kurds and the Turkish population together.

Yüksel Yavuz
Yüksel Yavuz was born in 1964 in the Kurdish part of Turkey. He moved to Germany in 1980. He studied Economy, Sociology, and Visual Communication at Hamburg’s Academy of Fine Arts. He worked at different social and culture projects and published regularly a migration journal. He has been involved in the film industry since 1990. His movies have won several prizes in international festivals.