By Nick Kossovan:

Toronto in late autumn rarely offers an afternoon like the one this past Friday, when warm air disperses silver sunlight that lights up decades of worn brick, making the old storefronts along College Street appear to glow like amber. Walking beside me through Little Italy (a historic, vibrant neighbourhood built on generations of immigrant hustle), as if to compound the weather’s rarity, is someone who’s profoundly impacted my life, yet someone I seldom get to spend uninterrupted time with: Halime Aktürk.

Halime, as I’ve written before, is an up-and-coming filmmaker whose striking beauty, sharp intellect, defiant dark eyes, and a smile Hollywood’s still searching for never fail to intimidate me. Add her casual flirtation with political activism, and I’m entirely outmatched. I’m hopelessly, shall I say, to keep within emotional boundaries, “devoted” to her. Sadly, my devotion’s unreciprocated, making Halime hard on my heart. Still, as I walk beside her, a cup of coffee in my hand while Halime is holding an herbal tea concoction, the rhythm of our stroll feels intrinsically Kurdish: unhurried, grounded, and temporarily free of overhanging grief.

It’s my devotion that keeps me hanging on to every word Halime says. She walks with brisk, sharp elegance, her velvety, sandpaper voice cutting through the screeching streetcar brakes, café chatter, and honking traffic as she speaks of the West’s indifference to the Kurdish struggle. While waiting for a traffic light to change, Halime pauses, turns to me, and says, her dark eyes flashing with quiet exhaustion and sudden fury: “Kurds keep it in the house.”

Halime’s words felt like a sudden drop in temperature. They lay bare why the constant, bubbling Kurdish diaspora remains virtually invisible to the rest of the world. For generations, Kurds have been displaced across hostile borders or have lived under regimes seeking to eradicate them, keeping their culture (language, music, history, ancient fabrics, and political trauma) to themselves, behind closed doors, not only to survive but to ensure it wouldn’t be destroyed.

As Halime sips her tea, she pulls out her phone and shows me runway models wearing uncredited faranji vests and ancestral Kurdish motifs.

The images hit me with a jolt of embarrassment. Here I am, hopelessly devoted to a Kurdish woman, claiming to care about her world, yet completely blind to the cultural extraction from Kurdish culture that’s underway. During the recent Paris Fashion Week, Louis Vuitton sent models down its Fall/Winter 2026–2027 runway wearing structured felt capes under the guise of ‘futuristic folklore,’ effectively looting Kurdish heritage and selling it as European avant-garde chic.

I stood there, staring at Halime’s phone, stung by my ignorance. I embodied the very Western indifference she’d just described. I like to think I stay informed, yet I’d completely missed this high-fashion heist, a stark reminder that the Kurdish struggle remains largely unknown outside the Kurdish community because Western media never covers it. My own blind spot mirrors a much larger one: mainstream media not only tunes out Kurdish reality but also actively ignores the slow, systematic dismantling of their heritage.