A $5,000 grant was awarded to the Turkish filmmaker Berke Bas for her project Hold Still

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

In October 1995, at the height of the decades long Turkish-Kurdish conflict, the military detained fifteen people in the Kurdish town of Dargecit in Southeastern Turkey. Seven of the detained, among them three children, were never seen alive again. What followed was a relentless, decades long fight by the families, first in search of their beloved ones, and later in search of justice for them. Families reached out to local lawyer Erdal Kuzu for help. Kuzu was at their side, when dark rumours led them to water wells in the vast Mardin landscape, and to the bodies of loved ones.

Twenty years after the killings, just before the statute of the limitations, a court case was opened against 18 defendants, including state officials and their paramilitary squads, on charges of “premeditated murder”. But this was only the beginning of a judicial path paved with growing indifference, denial and discrimination… heading towards impunity.