Kurdish revolution hanging by a thread
Daniel Nelson
Documentaries don’t get more esoteric than Threads Of A Revolution: it’s about a woman’s tenuous connection to a little-known social experiment in an unreported part of the world.
The camera quietly follows her visit, the filmmakers making no attempt to jazz up her meetings or hype the significance of her short tour.
The result is a warm, affectionate record of an extraordinary moment in a time and place of conflict and upheaval.
It is also a reminder that our media-curated stereotypes of other countries lack complexity and ignore nuances.
The woman around who the film is built, writer and artist Janet Biehl, was the long-time partner of Murray Bookchin an idealistic US academic twice her age who died in 2006. He championed a dream of an egalitarian people’s environmental democracy.
Bookchin’s ideas on social ecology and libertarian municipalism inspired jaailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish Workers Party, and years later a Kurdish enclave, Rujova, on the Syria–Turkey border started putting some of the ideas into practice, particularly those involving women’s rights, and invited Biehl to come and see the results (“I’ll be talkimng about hsi ideas while wesring his vest.”)b.
It’s amazing that a political theorist’s ideas have taken root tens of thousands of miles away in a war-torn corner of the world that has survived an ISIS onslaught, and equally amazing that decades later his collaborator makes the risky journey to talk to the people implementing the academic’s words.
Biehl’s odyssey is tinged with wistfulness that her former partner is not alive to witness the living experiment that he seeded.
There’s no hard questioning, but a lot of incidental insight in the film, and at least a whisp of hope that alternative ways or organising societies exist, even if for only a short time before capitalism or dictatorship sweeps them aside.
It’s hard to be optimistic. “This our fate as Kurds,” says one. “Kurds at all time participate in revolution, but when it comes to the end they don’t get anything.”