The dengbêj or the voices that say The Kurdistan of Fikret Atay

Fikret Atay lives in Batman, the city where he was born, located in southeast Anatolia. This border region between Turkey and Iraq, with many ethnic minorities, has suffered decades of military presence, political oppression and poverty. Atay uses video to document this situation and the inevitable dialogue between traditional culture and Western influences. Lalo’s Story portrays a friend interpreting a dengbêj –literally “the voices that say” – for the grandfather of the artist. The dengbêj is a typical way of telling stories in that region and includes songs and narration about love and war. Although the story is usually told by older people, who have accumulated more wisdom and experience, in the video Atay introduces a break with traditional values and reverses the roles between narrator and audience, in addition to substituting English for the Kurdish language.