'Little Black Fish' documentary lends a voice to children of war

The labeling of the collective attempts in the last half-a-decade on many fronts to bring Kurds more freedoms and rights, to bring an end to the war in the southeastern Turkey that has left its mark in the area for the last three decades and to help ending some deeply-rooted separatist notions has been called the Kurdish Initiative (or the Kurdish Opening), and later the Peace Process.

 The process, at least, which has been a taboo subject only in the last decade, has reverberated on screens in the recent history of mainstream Turkish cinema. There has also been an emergence of an independent cinema by Kurdish filmmakers with distinctive voices, and to that end, some of the most powerful documentaries on the region?s recent history.

One of the recent examples is a documentary produced by Drama ?stanbul, a group specializing in script development, film project design and production, called ?Küçük Kara Bal?klar: Güneydo?u?da Çocuk Olmak? (Little Black Fish: Being Children in the Southeast). The film is a collective effort, directed by five filmmakers, A. Haluk Ünal, Cem Terbiyeli, Ezel Akay, Önder ?nce and Serpil Güler, and is now available online at vimeo.com/108880966 for screening with English subtitles.

?Küçük Kara Bal?klar? lends its narrative to first-hand accounts of 11 people who were children in the region in the heat of war, all who witnessed the horrors of war at different times. Some are in their thirties now, others are barely teenagers. With no narrator, and occasional footage of the mentioned events, the film takes its power from the accounts of real witnesses, told with sadness, confusion, anger, occasional humor and calm to make sense of the horrors they experienced as children.

This is the story of children...