Film screening and lecture: “Layn – Where to?” (by Fadi Yeni Turk, Documentary, 2006, Lebanon)
Werkstatt der Kulturen, Wissmannstraße 32, 12049 Berlin
Documentary, 120 min, French/Arabic/Turkish etc.; Engl. st
Guest: Fadi Yeni Turk
Discussant: Zeynep Türkyilmaz (EUME Fellow)
A Mayadin al-Tahrir film screening in cooperation with EUME
Film screening followed by a Q&A with the film's director Fadi Yeni Turk
“Layn”, “where to?”, is an expression used in the dialect of Mardin, an antique city in Mesopotamia, Turkey. Along with the Armenian communities its Syriac Orthodox minorities were threatened by genocide. In 2004 the filmmaker set out from Lebanon onto a journey to find the scattered members of his community and, eventually, to visit his ancestral city. The thread he followed was the diary of his grandfather, a Syriac priest, born in 1899 in Mardin and deceased in 1982 in his Lebanese exile. Amsih Khbeiz Eddeir, or Abdallah as he was called before his ordination, recorded his memories meticulously. They lead into the city of Mardin in the early 20th century…
In addition to his work as D.O.P, Fadi Yeni Turk directed several short and full length documentaries, such as Demo, Layn, When the War Sank in, Monumentum.
Zeynep Türkyilmaz received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. Her dissertation, "Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire", is based on intensive research conducted in Ottoman, British, and several American missionary archives. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral at UNC-Chapel Hill between 2009-2010 and Europe in the Middle East - The Middle East in Europe Postdoctoral Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin between 2010-2011. She worked at the Dartmouth College as an assistant professor of history between 2011 and 2016. She is currently a EUME research fellow at Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, working on her project tentatively titled “An Archeology of Today: Tracing the Genealogies of Ezidi Victimhood”. Her research and teaching interests include state-formation, gender, nationalism, colonialism, religious communities with a focus on heterodoxy and missionary work in the Middle East from 1800 to the present.
