On the road to a Free Gaza, the cinema too is reached by an Al-Aqsa Flood…

The 7th Siirt International Short Film Festival, held this year under the theme "Free Gaza," came to a close on Friday evening with a final program at which awards were presented to the winners among the 293 films that entered the festival. The fact that the final program was attended by our Minister of National Education, Prof. Dr. Yusuf Tekin, who opened this academic year with a special lesson titled "The spirit of independence and love of homeland from Çanakkale to Gaza!", gave the Free Gaza festival an added meaning. At the start of the term we said how well-judged his decision was and how much courage it took in the face of those making noise against it. The self-confidence, courage and determination of the honorable Minister of National Education, who resolved to make such a beginning, paying no heed to the grumbling and discomfort coming from certain circles, so that the new generations might truly know and learn about themselves, their Lord, their nation and their history, deserves every appreciation and congratulation. How could anyone who today does not know Gaza, does not see it, and does not feel the kinship with it, possibly know Çanakkale?

It is a fact that the epic defense of the homeland taking place in Gaza constitutes one of the most genuine, most sincere and most heroic pages of Türkiye's War of Independence. The brave men of Gaza, who are fighting a desperate battle so as not to give up a single handful of the homeland for which they fight, are indistinguishable from the brave men of Çanakkale. Nor is the struggle they are waging one made epic through historical narratives or contrived cinema scripts; on the contrary, it is a real act of heroism unfolding before all of us today.

There are those who say that heroism has turned into a legend of old times that can no longer be seen, shown or encountered in our age of technology. After the Al-Aqsa Flood, the people of the modern world witnessed the return of this legend. Just as the world saw with its own eyes more than every example of barbarism that was thought to belong to the past, it also saw, in its finest form, in the Qassam Brigades and in the noble, patient, steadfast and resilient people of Gaza, the examples of heroism that are said to exist only in fairy tales.

The real-life stories displayed in Gaza every day are so real that they eclipse all the heroic tales, dramas and tragedies exaggerated to the utmost in order to move people. Perhaps no heroic story can be written after the Al-Aqsa Flood, because the men of Gaza have put forth the very finest of it in its truest form, through their lives, their stance, their struggle and their fighting.

Art, as an imitation of reality, also has a claim or a disposition to show reality in a story more beautiful, more orderly and more coherent than it actually is. In truth, such representations inevitably contain a degree of distortion. But what the distortion aims at is a more striking representation of reality. In this way, many ordinary lives are turned into great stories of heroism, with all their discordant elements filtered out. The labor of cinema, this artistic performance, can of course not be belittled. From whatever angle you look, it is a feat of skill, before it is art. But art itself does not always, inevitably, have a positive side.

The cinema screen can at the same time turn into a curtain drawn between us and reality, before our eyes, and the very close relationship of the film industry with politics and ideology from the outset has made it quite attractive in this respect. The Hollywood cinema has drawn no small number of curtains before our eyes by portraying the Native Americans, the most gentle, courteous and hospitable people in human history, as savage and bloodthirsty, while portraying the white people who came to occupy their homeland out of their greedy ambition as civilized and heroic. Consider what a thick curtain the same Hollywood industry has drawn before our eyes with at least 250 films it has made on the Holocaust since 1949.

The Zionist criminals have for years dazzled the world's eyes by using cinema, the media and the camera one way or another. Just as the Pharaohs produced a different perception of truth by dazzling the eyes of their own people through their magicians. So, in the context of Gaza, there is much that cinema can do against those who distort reality by dazzling the eyes, simply by putting forth the truth, and only the truth.

For this reason the most intensive and strongest program in the festival's seven-year history was prepared. With the very strong support of the Siirt Governorship and Siirt University, and with the encouragement and wholehearted participation of all the civil society organizations in Siirt, it became possible for this festival to be realized as a true festival of freedom. The festival took place both as film screenings and as a feast of ideas, where talks were held on cinema and especially on Gaza, resistance, freedom and heroism. Highly valuable participants from Türkiye, Palestine, Egypt, Syria and Jordan gave very valuable presentations on the differences between a liberating cinema and an occupier's cinema that places curtains before our eyes with regard to the truth. Prof. Dr. İhsan Süreyya Sırma, Selahattin Eş, Vahdettin İnce, Wajdi al-Arabi, Prof. Sami el-Arian, MOin Naim, Veysel Karataş, Aydın Aktay, Samir Arabiyat, Tülay Gökçimen, Nazif Tunç, Kemal Tekden, Muhammet Sağlam, Rıdvan Kaya, Turan Kışlakçı, Hişam Abdullah and others whose names I cannot mention probed the possibility of a free cinema for a Free Gaza, and laid bare the tricks of Orientalist, Islamophobic and Zionist cinema.

On the 3rd day of the festival came the news of the martyrdom of Yahya Sinwar, the charismatic leader of the Al-Aqsa Flood. But as this news, together with the details of his martyrdom, sank in, an unbelievable feeling spread over the place. Rather than saddening people, it came across to the gathering as a magnificent event that left them in astonishment and admiration with its story and its splendid end. Precisely in a world where heroism can be sustained only as a nostalgia through a false representation in films, it was a magnificent story of heroism that is hard to believe.

This martyrdom was not a death; it was as if a film of extraordinary elegance and aesthetic quality was being staged in which death itself was killed in the person of Yahya Sinwar and the living dead were mocked.

No film could be made, no script written, that surpasses this life. The script of the film of this hero, who did not give up the struggle even in his last moments, was written by God, but its cinematographer was, without knowing it, his enemies. The staff he hurled at his cameraman in his final moments, like a Staff of Moses that stripped his enemies' hands of all their claims, has already begun to take effect as the truth that swallows the serpents of Pharaoh's magicians.

In essence, everything we have witnessed in Gaza for a year invites us, in the name of art and in the name of philosophy, to reconsider everything we know and think, from the beginning. The most that all epic heroic cinema could do would be an imitation of what has happened in Gaza.

The Siirt Governorship, Siirt University, the civil society formations and local press of Siirt, and the short film makers and directors, who contributed greatly to the festival from the start, took part with heart and soul in writing together a message of Free Gaza that would rise from Siirt. I thank them all for their contributions in giving this message a voice in the most meaningful way at this time and in this context.