Exhausted from political prosecutions and a language ban, Kawa Nemir flees Turkey and takes refuge at Anne Frank’s former house in Amsterdam, now a residence for exiled writers. He is obsessed with translating Joyce’s Ulysses into Kurdish. It is an experiment in thinking about language and politics through the translation of Joyce’s novel into a language that is repressed. Kurdish is a language that has a long history, yet so many words and idioms only exist in the minds of Kurdish people. Kawa’s attempt is to redeem this collective memory. The translation of Ulysses, one of the hallmarks of modernist literature, serves as a dictionary of the everyday life of Kurdish people. With an episodic, multi-lingual, intertextual narration, the film uses archival film, newspaper clippings, YouTube clips, and footage from Kurdish grassroots resistance to salvage “the thing that goes through everything”, namely language.

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel, hosted by Baldwin Li.

This film was supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature.

Notes by Sunniva O’Flynn.

See all IFI and Bloomsday Film Festival 2023 screenings here.