ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Kurdish cinema, which has developed under the shadow of nationalist discourses in the transnational era, calls for an understanding beyond nationally determined cultural fields of production. In light of the unassimilable artifacts of Kurdish cinema, it explores its promise for the recognition of modern Kurdish culture in audiovisual terms. The chapter discusses three elements of Kurdish cinema: language, space, and memory. It presents the perplexities of the national cinema debates to pave the way for the promise that Kurdish cinema provides not only for Kurdish communities but also for the rethinking of the concept of national cinema. Under the shadow of historical denial and oppression, the belated audibility of Kurdish languages in movie theaters was a possibility only by the beginning of the 1990s. Kurdish cinema's claim for recognition is crystallized through its claim for agency in terms of these minor lines of flight in the grand narratives of becoming Kurdish.
