Browse films

The Heavy Burden

Yilmaz Ozdil
Turkey, 2019, 17 min.

In Kurdish with English subtitles.
This film is family friendly.

Avdel feeds his family with the salary of the donkey Bozo who works in the sanitation service of the city of Mardin in Turkey. When the "old Bozo" is retired by the municipality, Avdel must find a younger donkey to keep his job. To help his uncle, his nephew Salih, who fled from Syria, crosses the border to bring back his own donkey, which he had to leave because of the war.

Director's Statement

In this short film whose story takes place in Mardin, which has a 120 km border with Syria, I tried to ironically express what a Kurdish family torn between Turkey and Syria faces after the last war in Syria. In this simple story, visible and invisible boundaries mingle with war, migration and poverty. Certainly, this humble film cannot bring definitive answers to this notion of border, which are not only a political but also a philosophical problem. On the contrary, it aims to cast a human eye on this complex subject to show that, for war victims whose tragedies are masked by political debates, the line of separation never points to a line of demarcation between "life" and "death".

Category: Drama.
Themes: Border, Family, World Cinema.

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