Writer/director Fatma Belkıs reclaims the filmic artifacts of Turkish discrimination against Kurds in the singular micro short, Keje. Belkis picks up cuttingroom-floor remains from the 1968 film, Seyyit Han, a film that managed distribution approval by the Turkish Committee on Film Censorship only after producer, Abdurrahman Keskiner, excised every single utterance of the leading female character’s name, “Keje”—because it was a Kurdish name. This rejection of a Kurdish name was only one tyrannical enforcement of an official state policy exacting a comprehensive denial of Kurds as an ethnic population. Here then, with redemptive operatic ease, Belkis resurrects and coalesces every single utterance of the name in a kind of inevitable rapid-fire response and features the “Keje” quickfire between Seyyit Han’s original opening sequence and the film’s final “The End”. Keje is not just genre-defiant but utterly defiant. And restorative.

19 December 2023

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