Cemile Sahin Four Ballads for my Father – Spring, 2022

Cemile Sahin's film Spring is the first of her multi-part project Four Ballads for my Father.

A major motif of the overarching theme of Four Ballads for my Father is the role of water, in particular the economic and political effects of the GAP dam project in Turkey. For several decades, the Southeastern Anatolia Project, also known as GAP (Turkish: Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi), has been under construction on the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. For the neighboring countries of Syria and Iraq, the GAP project has become a serious threat and has repeatedly led to tensions between the countries.

Sahin's Spring addresses the topic through a fictional lens, telling the story of the Kurdish family whose homeland was flooded by a Turkish water dam project and its members displaced between Istanbul, Paris and on the road.