Sozdar, She Who Lives Her Promise

Sozdar, she who lives her promise is a frank portrait of the backgrounds and motives of Nuriye Kesbir, one of the leaders of the Kurdish resistance movement PKK. Her enormous determination and fighting spirit already manifested itself at the age of twelve, when she refused to be married off. After her native village had been destroyed and she had seen that many compatriots were persecuted and killed, she decided that her life did not have room for a marriage or family. In 1987 she joined the PKK. Amid many other female fighters, she developed into one of their leaders and a champion of women's rights. In 2001, she travelled from the mountains of Kurdistan to the Netherlands to discuss the emancipation of women with European Kurds. But she was arrested on Schiphol Airport and put in prison, awaiting a possible deportation to Turkey. Filmmaker Annegriet Wietsma wrote her a letter in jail and many visits ensued. Wietsma was in search for the question how a woman, grown up as girl in a very traditional and feudal society, gets to the point that she leaves the road of marrying off and motherhood, to wind up in an armed battle of life and death. In Sozdar - Kesbir's self-selected nickname, meaning 'she who keeps her promise' - Nuriye Kesbir is followed on her odd journey from a Dutch prison to the guerrilla camps of Northern Iraq. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)