This year the Freedom Lecture, an annual lecture organised by venue De Balie on freedom in the broadest sense, will be given by Diyar Hesso and Sêvînaz Evdikê of the Kurdish Rojava Film Commune. This film collective emerged in the ‘stateless democracy’ of the Rojava region in Northern Syria and stimulated a new generation of image-makers to make films based on their everyday reality. Rojava Film Commune is a non-hierarchical collective that stimulates film education and film production among the local population. In this way, film becomes a medium for depicting the experiences of Kurdish civilians.
The End Will Be Spectacular, the first feature film by the collective, is screening at IFFR 2020. This film about the Turkish siege of Sur, is told from the perspective of young resistance fighters defending the historic area in 2015. A number of the survivors of this struggle play the lead roles in this film by Ersin Çelik, a member of the Rojava Film Commune.
The Freedom Lecture is an initiative of De Balie and is made possible by the Stichting Democratie en Media and vfonds.
