23/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: We chatted with the Kurdish-German director about dealing with generational trauma and its omittance from daily life

When a German documentary film team travels to Eastern Turkey to shoot a portrait of a Kurdish woman mourning her missing son, all seems well, at first. But strange happenings soon befall the film crew, as well as locals in the town. Somebody is watching them, surveillance videos are sent as a warning, people disappear. In a place where the conflict between Turks and Kurds is still bubbling hot under the surface, any poking at this cloak of silence is considered a threat. Kurdish-German director Ayşe Polat tries to unravel some of this generational trauma in In the Blind Spot [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ayşe Polat
film profile], her film premiered in the Encounters section of the Berlinale. What effect does it have on a community when conflict and genocide are ignored for too long?

Cineuropa: The film is called In the Blind Spot. This refers not only to the Kurds in Turkey but also to the nested narrative. What came first? The narrative structure or the title?
Ayşe Polat: The narrative came much earlier. In The Blind Spot is the third film in a trilogy. The first two films were the documentary The Others [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and the feature film The Heiress. They were all shot in north-eastern Turkey and also employ different perspectives.

To date, you have always shot your films from the perspective of German Turks. Now, for the first time, Turkish locals are at the centre of your story. Was this a story which you realised you could tell yourself, or did you decide to carry out research in the region first?
The idea for the film came about during the documentary, which was about the genocide of Armenians in the Kurdish part of Turkey. Someone told us about these missing people who were abducted in the 90s. He said this with such intimacy, it really touched me. As the film was developing, it was clear to me that I didn't only want to show the side of the victims, but also that of the perpetrators. It's such a traumatic story that has left horrible marks on the victims and haunts the perpetrators in a completely different way.

We usually only talk about genocide while it is happening. At any other point in time, it is quite literally a blind spot too.
Exactly, and this raises the question of how a society should deal with it. We start the movie from the Western viewpoint, that of the German documentary filmmakers. It’s a bit of a postcolonial framing because they underestimate things. People who have Kurdish and Turkish roots, on the other hand, carry this history with them. It's the history of their parents, their grandparents. That would be a task for Germany and Europe in general to take on, not looking away.

You also play with the supernatural in the film.
I think genre films are exciting, and the plot just developed that way. The film argues that this blind spot where that cruel history is located, which has not been processed by the people, has given rise to ghosts over the generations. These ghosts take on a life of their own and cause trouble to finally make themselves heard. To be called by a name. Every act of cruelty leaves traces and they will make themselves felt at some point.

What do you perceive as the biggest problem in the region now?
I don’t show the political reality of Turkey in my film. But for me, transgenerational trauma is a central theme. The traces it leaves behind and how people deal with it. I get the impression that most nations are built on mourning and genocide. That’s universal, in a way. I hope that people will see the film as something that can happen anywhere, not just in Turkey.