“What is practiced against the Kurds will be exercised against Syrian society” – Syrian-Kurdish director

Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria in March 2011, it is known that the involvement of artists in the popular movement was very prominent but in different categories, some of them went with the movement at various stages till the end, some of them stuck to the government and some of them were neutral who did not disclose a position, while others remained with the popular movement and its rightful demands, but they withdrew when this movement deviated into places of worship and drifted into infighting and armed conflict for power.

Perhaps the last classification is the closest to the stance of the Kurdish film director “Mohammed Abdul Aziz”, coming to Damascus from northern Syria, who told North-Press a lot about the Turkish invasion in northern Syria and targeting the Kurdish figure there.

He said: “Yes, the Kurds have only the wind, death and recklessness of the liquid geography as long as the real national civil project is absent, but death here is a physical dimension, transformation and formula of integration, and the fact that the failure to understand the Kurdish mythological personality traits  from this angle always disrupts its handling”.

He continued: “But it is also important to know the extent of the Kurdish spirit and collective mind soaking in the form of rebellion and floating in the spaces of rejection and the prevailing political and social levels through their long bloody history and to fight against the authorities in each region”.

“This rebellious spirit is positive and dynamic, so when a Kurd says “no”, it carries the formula of re-dismantling and installing the familiar, precipitated and prevailing,” he said.

Abdul Aziz believes that all Syrians are in danger and that what is being practiced against the Kurds will be exercised against the rest of the components of the Syrian society.

He added: “All the components of Syria have only the wind and dust as long as the elements of the modern state with its secular civic principles are absent”.

“So we must view the Kurds in the Syrian multi-components of Arabs, Syriac, Armenians, Circassians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, who in total constitute Syria’s most rich cultural and civilizational dimension,” he added.

He wondered: “This emptiness of the Syrian public figure prompts us to look again in a different perspective in asking the question about our Syrian national identity, and why has it been torn to this extent, what is fake, fragile and shallow in it? What are the elements of rebuilding it realistically and contemporary without confusion? 

The Autonomous Administration is advanced in the form of administrative centralization

Regarding the Autonomous Administration in north and east of Syria, the Syrian-Kurdish director said: “It is possible to develop the Autonomous Administration and build on it through the constitutional institutions in the country after voting or referendum, when the time is appropriate this formula although primitive or perhaps a draft to fill the vacuum that occurred in the region, it has preserved civil peace and the unity of the country”.

He added: “Its problem lies in the fact that it is ahead of the formula of administrative centralization and the rigidity of the Syrian political awareness as a result of half a century of totalitarian centralism and the nationalization of the public mind and the pluralistic collective consciousness under the iron curtain of the solid national identity of the one-dimension in a diverse and rich society like the Syrian civil society.”

He believes that the diversity of the society that our national project was supposed to rely on has been robbed or marginalized, and floating a one-dimensional project, as the country has lost its voice, so it will not be easy for the total public to read and understand this administrative formula with its national dimensions and development.

According to him: “If they find that the administration is disruptive or not conducive, it can be rejected, but this usually happens when the country is fully healthy, so you see this deep fragmentation and the closure that Syrian citizens are experiencing over the country’s areas regarding their regional, sectarian, national, and narrow ethnic identities”.

Regarding his opinion on the Russian-Turkish agreement, he said: “I don’t think that someone like Erdogan and his regime has any good intentions towards our country, Erdogan is a hyena of tombs, who is fed on crises and provoke them perhaps if he offered an apology to the peoples of the region, Arabs, Kurds, Syriacs and Yazidis, only then we can think of believing his intentions in humanitarian terms.

The bordering triangle in a movie

Asked if he was thinking about making a film about this heinous crime witnessed by the silent world, he said:

“Since 2009, I had a project with the late renowned Syrian actor “Khaled Taja” about the bordering triangle in northeastern Syria. We have completed the text together and we started looking for the financiers, but because of erupting the crisis and then Khaled’s passing away, the project was stopped, maybe if I ever find an appropriate funding, I will complete that project for Khaled Taja and for many other reasons.”

It is worth mentioning that the film “Half a Gram Nicotine”, the first film by director Mohamed Abdel Aziz won three awards at Bari Festival in Italy (2009) and then followed his films, the most recent of which was “Four O’clock at Paradise”, and his television “Translation of Longings” and other works.