Kazim Öz, film director

Kazim Öz is a Kurdish film director, screenwriter, editor, cinematographer, and producer whose most acclaimed films include Bahoz, Zer, and Son Mevsim: Şavaklar. As a Kurdish Alevi leftist from Dersim, he has experienced enormous pressure on his artistic expression.

Born in 1973 in a rural part of Dersim, he grew up tending the family’s goats. He studied civil engineering at Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul.  He started his film career in 1992 by acting at Teatra Jiyana Nu and also worked as a director. His first film was Destên Me Wê Bibin Bask Emê Bifirin Herin… a documentary released in 1996.

From 1996, he was involved with the film department of the Mesopotamia Culture Center (known today as the Mesopotamian Cinema Collective).

His films have won many awards. For example, Dûr (Distant), a feature documentary, was awarded “best documentary” in the Turkei und Deutschland Film Festival, Nürnberg in 2004. But his films have also encountered censorship.

His first film Ax (1999) (The Land) was well received by the public and in international cinema. But it was censored and then banned by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. When it was to be shipped from Turkey to Europe, the courier was detained on grounds of being a suspected PKK sympathizer. After the film was screened at several European festivals, the ban was lifted in Turkey as well.

His first long feature, Fotograf (The Photograph), 2001, appeared in theatres in winter 2002 and achieved several prizes. But it was removed from the program of 10th New Horizons International Film Festival in Poland, due to the intervention of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey. The Turkish ministry was a sponsor of the festival. By threatening to withdraw its financial support, Turkey applied censorship abroad.

Also in 2010 he released Son Mevsim: Şavaklar (The Last Season: Shawaks) a feature-length documentary (co-production with ARTE-France). It explores the nomadic Shawak community in eastern Turkey. In winter, the nomads live in a village, but when spring comes, they trek high into the mountains to pasture their livestock. Oz lived with the Shawak for a year, observing their daily lives up close. The film produces an intimate depiction of their way of life.

Zer (2017), Öz’s seventh feature, is his best-known film. It  tells the story of a young man, Jan, living in New York, who embarks on a journey and discovers his Kurdish ancestry. The film reveals a process of collective memory at work.

His most recent film is Elif Ana (2022).