"Politics of Erasure from Mardin’s Borderlands to Post-Earthquake Antakya"

Join the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program for a screening of the documentaries Star on the Border and Missed Lives: the Doms followed by a discussion with directors Berivan Saruhan and Mehmet Kuyumcu on Tuesday, March 31 at 12:00pm in Kresge 1515 and via Zoom. This is the third documentary screening in the series “Witness, Archive, Evidence: Documentary Cinema and the Politics of Memory in Turkey." Lunch will be provided.

Register for Zoom: https://bit.ly/4suMo0y

Our third and final screening brings together two documentaries that trace how communities are made visible or erased through state power, disaster, and everyday inequality.

Star on the Border follows the border settlement of Dirbesiyê (Mardin), where military and political pressures reshape daily life. The film captures, in particular, a 1993 raid in which a star motif on house window railings was declared a “political symbol” and forcibly removed.

Missed Lives: the Doms turns to Dom families in Antakya, observing their lives amid deep poverty, systemic exclusion, and discrimination. Originally a photography project, the film’s archive was partially destroyed in the 2023 earthquake; salvaged images and new post-quake footage become a form of witnessing that records not only devastation, but also the inequalities that intensified afterward: rising rights violations, ruptures in access to education, and continued public invisibility.Together, these films resist a simple narrative of victimhood. They foreground survival, solidarity, and cultural memory under threat, showing how lives are systematically sidelined through everyday exclusions—and how communities nonetheless insist on visibility, dignity, and belonging. More broadly, they trace survival as a daily practice and erasure as a slow procedure, keeping cultural memory alive in the face of pressure, neglect, and loss.

Directors' Bios:

Berivan Saruhan, the director of Star on the Border, was born in Mardin. She graduated from Mardin Artuklu University’s Department of Kurdish Language and Literature in 2017 and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Kurdish Language and Culture at the same university. She has worked both as a volunteer and a professional in various NGOs focusing on migration and violence against women. She has been working as a certified translator and editor since 2016.

Mehmet Kuyumcu, the director of Missied Lives: the Doms, is a rights advocate and documentary filmmaker based in Hatay/Antakya whose post-earthquake work focuses on social inequalities, cultural rights, and the right to education, with particular attention to the invisibility and displacement of Dom and Romani communities and their exclusion through public policy. Bringing together field-based research, advocacy, and visual storytelling, he approaches documentary not only as an aesthetic practice but as a form of witnessing, memory, and political responsibility, aiming to make vulnerable communities’ experiences visible and to spark public debate around cultural rights.

Documentary Series: “Witness, Archive, Evidence: Documentary Cinema and the Politics of Memory in Turkey”

Witness, Archive, Evidence: Documentary Cinema and the Politics of Memory in Turkey is a screening-and-conversation series that brings together four documentaries tracing how violence, inequality, and displacement are lived, and contested, through institutions and everyday life. Moving across courtrooms and case files, borderlands and militarized landscapes, boarding schools and assimilationist discipline, and post-earthquake precarity and minority survival, these films ask what counts as evidence when harm is denied, normalized, or bureaucratically managed. Centering testimony, archival traces, and embodied memory, the series explores documentary cinema as a mode of public witnessing: one that not only records aftermaths of state power, but also illuminates the ongoing struggles for rights, recognition, and justice. Each screening is followed by a conversation with the directors.

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Host or Publisher Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program