You don't look nothing alike

Looking around with her stepfather. Gentle hills, low vegetation, dry soil, ruins of houses from the 1970s. Ali Ekber Vural once left for Germany from here. At the time he buried his binoculars with the Zeiss lenses and never found them again. Now his stepdaughter’s camera takes a close look. Dêrsim – a name that has disappeared from the map of Turkey, yet still lives on in many people’s memories. The region, a former refuge for Kurds and Alevis, was renamed “Tunceli” in 1935 as part of a national homogenisation process. This landscape has witnessed state violence, forced resettlements, massacres, torture, assimilation policies, and a lack of coming to terms with all this. “Can you imagine such a man coming from this environment and integrating in Germany?” Ali asks. A narrated summary of his life that starts with the whispered, forbidden language of his childhood and leads to the complex diaspora experience in the new homeland, where, to put it bluntly, he was left high and dry. You have to have been there to understand what happened. Maybe a new, shared view will be possible then. (Quelle: Dok-Leipzig 2025, Jan Künemund)