"Zer" by Kazım Öz, now on YouTube

On May 5, 2023, Kazım Öz posted his film Zer (2017) on YouTube. “When I couldn’t find a digital platform to publish it,” he explains, “I decided to put my movie on YouTube. You will be able to watch the scenes of the movie that are banned in Turkey. It will be shown with subtitle option in 15 languages.”

Zer is the seventh feature film by Kazım Öz and is his best-known film. It  tells the story of a young man, Jan, who lives in New York and studies music. Jan’s elderly grandmother in Turkey, Zarife, develops cancer, so his father brings her to New York for treatment. While Zarife is in the hospital, Jan develops a close relationship with her. She tells him about his Kurdish origins and  about the 1938 Dersim Massacre, which has been erased from official Turkish history.  Zarife is a survivor of the massacre (in which thousands of Kurds were murdered or displaced), but she has hidden her identity for most of her life. On her deathbed, she whispers a song into Jan’s ear, called “Zer.”

After she dies, Jan travels to Turkey to look for the origins of the song. He  encounters many versions along the way.  During his search, he discovers Zarife’s past and reconnects with his ancestors and their repressed social trauma. The film reveals a process of collective memory at work.

Censorship

The film had been supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. When it was finished, the film crew applied to the Ministry’s General Directorate of Copyright for the recording and registration license. Before the ministry would agree to give the film its license, its audit board asked Kazım Öz to cut two scenes . The first scene was one that presented facts about 1938 Dersim Massacre and the second showed Jan’s encounter with Kurdish guerrillas at their camp.

“As a response to our application, the audit board wanted us to cut some scenes. If we didn’t, the film wasn’t going to be seen and we have to pay back the Ministry support,” Öz later recalled.  The ministry had a legal right to demand repayment, so the director had to accept the censorship.

“I was expecting a censor on the guerrilla scene but not for the Dersim ’38 scene. The Ministry was crueler than I thought.  . . . They even censored the sentence ‘In 1938, thousands of Kurdish-Alevi citizens were massacred by the state.’ Even Erdoğan himself accepted this fact in front of public.”

Oz blacked out the three-and-half-minute-long scene and the dialogue but kept the atmospheric sound. This partially blacked-out version received the recording and registration license from the ministry.

The film was to premiere in April 2017, at the 36th İstanbul film Festival. Öz decided to place text on the blacked0out scenes, which read: “You are not able to watch this scene because it was found inconvenient by the Supreme Audit Board of the General Directorate of Cinema of the Ministry of Culture.”  

Once that was shown, the audit board canceled the film’s recording and registration license. “The cancellation happened when the film was about to begin to circulate in movie theatres, therefore the film crew quickly decided to cut off the blacked-out scenes to get the license back,” Öz recalled. Some 100 copies were to be sent to theaters, but they had received the cancellation notice. After many complications, the twice-censored version was ultimately screened by only 11 move theaters.

“I am against the power and state in Turkey,” he has said. “My films are political but that’s not something I do because I want to. The way I live there forces me to make political films.”

Öz has said, “We are talking about a cinema that comes out as a result of struggle by the Kurds and the revolutionary movements of Turkey. If we can show our films despite everything, I think we need to talk about a legitimacy that this struggle created. It’s not a little thing. People paid a huge price just to speak their native language. Despite everything, Kurdish cinema is emerging with a will.”

Zer was screened at the third edition of the New York Kurdish Film Festival.

Sources:

Hazal Sipahi, “Dealing with Art Censorship in Turkey: The Case of Kazım Öz’s film Her,” Seismopolite: Journal of Art and Politics, n.d., 

Ana Grgić, “Kazım Öz on Zer,” East European Film Bulletin 79 (November 2017),