By Nick Kossovan:

“Despite our suffering, nobody cares about us. We have shared our stories, but even then, they have not done anything for us.” – Leyla Telo, a survivor of the Yazidi genocide.

Some films make you “realize.” Ezda, a short documentary film by emerging Kurdish-Canadian filmmaker Halime Aktürk, in which Ezda, a survivor of the Yazidi genocide carried out by ISIS between 2014 and 2017, opens up about her life while in captivity and her efforts to start a new life for herself and her children in Canada, is such a film.
Through Ezda, Halime does a brilliant job of bringing to life the central defining element of Kurdish cinema—presenting the hardships and traumas experienced by Kurds, being honest about what many Kurds are feeling and thinking without being overly guarded or curated.

Additionally impressive is how Ezda touches on the Kurdish geopolitical dichotomy, a topic hardly discussed in the West. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone outside of the Middle East who knows Kurds are the world’s largest ethnic group—thought to number between 36 million and 46 million—without a country. Kurds have no place to call “home.” As a result of persecution, they’ve been forced to settle, such as Ezda did, wherever they could, resulting in Kurds becoming a diasporan international community that stretches across the globe.As a Yazidi, Ezda’s story has an additional geopolitical layer. There’s a long-running debate about Yazidi identity among Yazidi communities and scholars. Yazidis are generally considered a Kurdish-speaking, endogamous religious group indigenous to Kurdistan. Therefore, Yazidis are regarded as Kurds and, consequently, experience the same geopolitical circumstances as other Kurdish groups in Iraq.

As a result of my upbringing— a father having experienced the post-World War II geopolitical tensions that created the Cold War, which gradually morphed into détente, and the Western media encouraging an “us versus them” divide with the term “Eastern Europe”—I view the world through its many divides, West vs. East, Political Left vs. Political Right, He vs. Her, War Mongering vs. Peace Loving… you get the picture. I look for and, predictably, see the ongoing power struggles over individual and collective (read: governments) self-interests that keep the world in constant disharmony. Therefore, as I watched Ezda, the geopolitical divisiveness that forced Ezda to be part of the Kurdish global diaspora jumped out at me while also triggering a question—again, thanks to my upbringing—I’ve been thinking about for years.