Making Transnational Publics: Circuits of Censorship and Technologies of Publicity in Kurdish Media Circulation

Abstract

Kurdish media producers who interweave social and political agendas with their filmmaking are often marginalized within Turkish media worlds. Impeded by national censorship these filmmakers move between national and transnational media worlds to advance their cinematic work. Such movement helps them create and maintain transnational publics that reinforce circulation of their media texts. Here I analyze how a documentary film about a seminomadic Kurdish community moves through international screening venues. As it journeys through film festivals in Europe its director Kazim oz accompanies it and through deliberate discourse attempts to increase and accelerate the film's transnational circulation. I explore the ways that oz discursively globalizes his film relates it to festival audiences flags the politics of Kurdish media production and seeks to construct a European public sensitive to the plight of Turkey's Kurds.