Mete­ors

The gro­cery store is open. Yet no one can reach it. Every­one is scared of get­ting shot.” These are the words of writer Ebru Ojen from her book ​‘The Vac­cine’, used in this poet­ic com­men­tary of Kur­dish expe­ri­ences under mar­tial law.

Mete­ors is Gürcan Keltek’s debut fea­ture. It is a com­pi­la­tion of archival footage from local peo­ple in East­ern Ana­to­lia, whose towns were raid­ed by the Turk­ish army in July 2015. After a peri­od of cease­fire and two-and-a-half years of nego­ti­a­tion, sol­diers were sent by the gov­ern­ment to defeat the Kur­dis­tan Worker’s Par­ty (PKK). The few spo­ken sequences of this polit­i­cal doc­u­men­tary see Ojen con­duct­ing one-on-one inter­views with Kurds now liv­ing under Turk­ish terror.

Not much is explained over the film’s six parts. This mir­rors the expe­ri­ence of Kur­dish civil­ians as they sud­den­ly became sur­vivors overnight. Like them, we are thrown into the midst of vio­lence and may­hem but uncer­tain of what is hap­pen­ing before us. Yet one thing we can acute­ly feel is the immi­nence of dan­ger. Live-stream clips grad­u­al­ly reveal details of the night when the Turk­ish army tricked inhab­i­tants into leav­ing their hous­es before killing them.

The con­flict received no media cov­er­age or offi­cial report, and the quiet­ness of Mete­ors echoes this shock­ing silence. Fast-paced edit­ing adds ten­sion to the mono­chro­mat­ic film, which makes the event feel like it’s from a dis­tant past. Kel­tek uses aes­thet­ic to tran­scend the codes of the genre. A mete­or show­er serves as an inter­lude in the conflict.

Fire­balls irra­di­ate the dark sky, as Ojen engages in a philo­soph­i­cal enquiry, giv­ing a whole new dimen­sion to the film. The nar­ra­tor lists her favourite words on paper so as not to for­get the beau­ty of her lan­guage. ​“Every­thing which once remind­ed myself to me changed,” states the writer, as she insight­ful­ly pon­ders the fate of mem­o­ry after these times of exo­dus and disarray.