Marginalization and Minorities: Films by Mukaddas Mijit and Leyla Toprak

Qetiq – Rock 'n Urumchi
Mukaddas Mijit, Germany 2013, 56 Min.

Red Handkerchief
Leyla Toprak, Turkey 2015, 16 Min.

Distant
Leyla Toprak, Turkey 2016, 16 Min.

Qetiq – Rock 'n Urumchi takes Ürümchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, as a departure point. The city is home to the musician Perhat, who like many other musicians from the region never thought about leaving. A film about music caught up in the tension between tradition and modernity. Red Handkerchief documents the story of five Kurds who were sentenced to prison for 14-25 years and how they managed to survive through the Kurdish folk dance Govend, which gave them “a feeling of unboundedness in a bounded place”. Distant observes the guerilla women’s rebellion in Kobanê against dominant social descriptions which had ignored women for years.

Mukaddas Mijit is an ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, dancer, and music manager born in Ürümchi. She was awarded her PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Paris Nanterre in 2015, researching the “Staging of Uyghur Music and Dance”. Besides publishing articles in edited volumes and peer reviewed journals including Cahier d'ethnomusicologie, she has made documentaries on Uyghur culture. 

Leyla Toprak was born in 1980 in Istanbul. Until 2013 she took part in the modern dance collective Mesopotamia Dance in Istanbul. In 2014, she graduated from the Performing Arts Department, and until 2017 she studied Cinema at Istanbul Bilgi University. She wrote, choreographed and directed several performances and video works.