Video Ulupamir Köyü Belgesel Filmi - Erciş/VAN - A Film About Pamir Kirghiz Turks - Kırgız Türkleri

The Pamir Kirghiz are a tribe of some 2,000 people from the Pamir region of Central Asia. For the last 27 years they have lived in exile in Eastern Turkey. In 2005 an Anglo-Turkish film crew arrives in their village to work with the tribe to tell their story. In a series of scenes divided into "chapters", we see revealing interviews with the Kirghiz, see exciting and entertaining reconstructions shot on film in a variety of different cinematic styles, and comic scenes of the interaction between the film crew and the community. During this process, we learn how the Pamir Kirghiz' antipathy to Communism drove them from Soviet Russia, then later from Maoist China, and finally from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to their current exile. And as the past is explored in interview and reconstruction, we see how the Pamir Kirghiz live today in modern Turkey. The film is part historical document, part ethnographical description of a unique people, part portrait of the conflict between individual and globalised culture, and part comedy about the process of film-making.
- Written by David Martin

To preserve their culture, the Pamir Kirghiz people have migrated across Central Asia from the U.S.S.R to China to Afghanistan to Pakistan and finally to remote eastern Turkey, but now they face the most serious threat to their traditions, globalization.
- Written by Tribeca Film Festival

This multiple award-winning documentary takes a droll and affectionate look at the last hundred years in the history and culture of the Pamir Kirghiz, a semi nomadic tribe originating in Central Asia. Resistant to Communism, facing violence and imprisonment, the tribe were driven from country to country until an appeal for international assistance led them to Eastern Turkey, where they have lived for the last 27 years (a counter offer from the USA would have seen them shipped off to Alaska). Working in collaboration with Ekber Kutlu, a Kirghiz sculptor and intellectual, Ben Hopkins (The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz) mixes new documentary footage with dramatic re-constructions filmed in a variety of cinematic styles and acted out by the Kirghiz. These make for an engaging glimpse into the tribe's past, showing their resilience and humour, and also touching on the younger generation's very different hopes for the future. The film's warm-hearted tone is a delight, exemplified in the running gag which gives the film its title.

Yönetmen Ben Hopkins
Oyuncular Sereban Aslan, Süleyman Atanisev ve İsmail Atılgan
Türü belgesel
Renk Renkli
Çıkış tarih(ler)i 17 Şubat 2006 (Berlin Uluslararası Film Festivali)
Süre 84 dakika (Birleşik Krallık)
Dil İngilizce, Türkçe

Ölmüş Bir Koyunu Değerlendirmenin 37 Yolu, (37 Uses for A Dead Sheep) İngiliz yönetmen Ben Hopkins’in Pamir Kırgızlarının hayatını konu alan belgesel filmidir. Van'ın Erciş ilçesine bağlı Ulupamir köyü sakinlerinin rol aldığı ve Pamir Kırgızlarının Afganistan'dan Türkiye'ye uzanan hikâyesinin anlatıldığı film Türkiye'de çekildi.

Kanada’da yapılan Hot Docs Uluslararası Belgesel Film Festivali’nde ve Britanya’nın önemli belgesel film festivali Britdoc'ta en eyi belgesel film ödülünün sahibi oldu.

Although this ethnographic documentary about the migratory struggles of the Pamir Kirghiz people does briefly rattle off 37 uses for a dead sheep, the playful title deliberately underscores the serious geopolitical overtones of the film. Director Ben Hopkins tastefully blends reenactments shot on 16 mm and Super-8 film with interviews to tell the history of how these stoic people abandoned their seminomadic existence in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan for a comfortable life in a Turkish town filled with fixed stone houses. In most cases, Communist oppression of both the Soviet and Maoist varieties was what forced the Pamir Kirghiz to migrate five times: first from Central Asia to China, then from Tajikistan to Pakistan, and finally to Turkey. In this collaboration between subject and filmmaker, Hopkins uses Kirghiz people, several of whom endured all five migrations, to reenact the dramatic journey from the freezing Tajikistan mountains-with altitudes of 4,000 meters-to Pakistan. After four years they were finally offered land in Ulupamir in eastern Turkey thanks to Rahman Qul, their last leader, whose efforts to keep his community together would have made even Moses proud. Now comfortably settled, the tribe's scars seem to be healing nicely, perhaps too nicely. For the most part, the tribe's younger generation is ready to move on and forget their heritage. One white-bearded man comments that all the young people do is sit in front of the television and go to Istanbul. But, as he shrugs and says, "that doesn't bother me." And given the many physical and emotional hardships that his generation had to endure, it is easy to see why it wouldn't.