For the 16th Kurdish Film Festival Berlin 2026, we turn our attention to a rarely told history: that of the Kurds in the former Soviet Union.
Between deportation and hope, between state control and cultural self-assertion, a distinct Kurdish cultural landscape developed over decades, shaped by the political, social and cultural realities of the Soviet era.
This festival focus is an attempt to bring together scattered fragments of a collective memory and make them visible. It explores how Kurdish identity was shaped within a socialist context through films, photographs, songs, literary works and personal testimonies that have survived in archives, family collections and oral histories.
Curatorial Concept
Our aim is to create an open dialogue between film, art and history.
The programme invites audiences to rethink the relationship between memory and belonging, languages and borders, archives and the present. It explores how cultural identity is preserved, transformed and transmitted under specific political conditions.
This focus is not intended as a purely historical retrospective, but as an artistic approach to questions that remain relevant today:
How is cultural identity preserved within diaspora and displacement?
What traces are left by a system that simultaneously enabled and restricted forms of belonging?
And how do these histories continue to shape Kurdish consciousness today?
Through films, conversations and artistic contributions, the festival creates a space for remembrance, dialogue and new perspectives on a lesser-known chapter of Kurdish history.
