Kurdi

Having spent the best part of 6 years, living, filming and surviving the madness of the Balkans and making 4 and a ¼ films - and failing to complete a 5th - I returned to Glasgow in the summer of 2001. It was a city that had changed from the place that I’d known. More coloured faces, a host of new languages, new cultures and a new community who were known, or rather tagged as the ‘Asylum seekers’.
Who were they? Why were they here…? Were they really the great threat that many racist right - and left - wing politicians feared?
It didn’t take long for me to find out for myself.
The pointless murder of a Kurdish Asylum seeker, and the anger and fear that it unleashed, saw many members of this new community taking to the streets. They were demanding to be treated as decent human beings above all else.
I found myself drawn to these people, who amongst them counted a former Kurdish Peshmarga freedom fighter called Peri. Peri the Kurd.
And then 9/11 happened.
With Peri, three days before the start of the current war in Iraq we began a journey – not just to tell his story but also to find a way of telling it with him by writing directly with the camera. We were searching for a way of telling Peri’s story that used digital video cameras in a direct and reactive fashion and, over the course of our initial filming in Glasgow, we began to define a modus-operandi that allowed us to overcome both language and cultural barriers….
What followed over the next 5 years was a frustrating, exciting, dangerous and at times irresponsible journey, in search of a past, a present and (even though we didn’t know it at the time) a future…