Film screening : HOLD STILL (DARGEÇİT)

Turkey’s long history of violence, conflict, and impunity has produced an anxious present shaped by unresolved pasts and the fragility of the rule of law. The documentary Dargeçit, which follows the trial concerning a case of enforced disappearance in the context of the Kurdish conflict, offers profound insights into the mechanisms of impunity, the persistence of demands for truth and accountability, and the ongoing struggle for justice. Throughout the film, the historically and normatively charged notion of justice is critically interrogated through the perspectives of relatives of the disappeared, lawyers, and human rights defenders.

Following the screening, Özgür Sevgi Göral, holder of the Chaire UXIL-ICM and advisor to the documentary, will give a talk entitled Violent Pasts, Radical Futures: Reckoning with the Past in Turkey. Her talk will explore the temporalities shaping both the search for justice led by the relatives of the disappeared and the enduring cycles of violence, conflict, and impunity in Turkey.

ABOUT THE FILM

HOLD STILL (DARGEÇİT)

Director: Berke Baş
TÜRKİYE / 2024 / DCP / Colour / 82’ / Turkish, Kurdish; Turkish, English s.t.
Director of Photography: Berke Baş
Editing: Catherine Gouze, Eytan İpeker, Berke Baş
Producer: Enis Köstepen
Production Company: Hafıza Merkezi, Liman Film, inHouse projects

27 years and counting… Families whose sons and brothers disappeared at the hands of state forces in the Dargeçit district of Mardin in 1995 are fighting for truth and justice within the Turkish judicial system with the help of their lawyer and the Human Rights Association. They travel for hours to each hearing of the trial, which finally began in 2015. While breaking the state’s wall of impunity may seem like an impossible task, “the truth is out there for those who want to see it.”

Awards: 

43rd Istanbul Film Festival National Documentary Competition (April 17-28, 2024) – Best Documentary
17th Documentarist Istanbul Documentary Days (June 3-8, 2024) – Best Cinematography, Best Editing
57th SİYAD – Film Critics Association Awards – Best Documentary Award
14th London Kurdish Film Festival – Mehmet Aksoy Best Documentary Award
9th FilmAmed Documentary Film Festival – Orhan Doğan Award for Truth and Justice

BIOS

Özgür Sevgi Göral graduated from the Faculty of Law at Istanbul University and completed her MA at Boğaziçi University on childhood and juvenile delinquency in the early Republican period. In 2017, she received her PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) with a dissertation entitled Enforced Disappearance and Forced Migration in the Context of Kurdish Conflict: Loss, Mourning and Politics at the Margin. She also taught various courses at different universities in Turkey.

She was among the founders of the Truth Justice Memory Center (Hafıza Merkezi), where she worked as Director of the Memory Studies Program until 2018. After 2018, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Université Paris 8, conducting research on the colonial memory regimes of Turkey and France. Following teaching positions at Sciences Po and INALCO, she was a visiting researcher at University of Cambridge during the 2022–2023 academic year.

Since November 2023, she has been conducting a research project at EHESS on political and social movements in Turkey and in the diaspora. Since 2025, she has held the Chaire UXIL-ICM and conducts her research at the EHESS Centre d’Études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques (CETOBaC) within the framework of her project entitled En attendant Godot: Différents régimes de temporalités des migrants de la Turquie au sein de l’espace européen (Waiting for Godot: Varied Temporal Regimes of Migrants from Turkey within the European Space).

She has published several books and articles on enforced disappearances, state violence, memory studies, gender studies, and the anthropology of law. She is the author of the book Yaramız Derindir: Hafıza Sahası ve Sömürgeci Afazi (Our Wound Runs Deep: The Field of Memory and Colonial Aphasia).

Nazan Maksudyan is a Senior Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in the ERC Starting Grant, ‘Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1914’ (EP/X032833/1) and a visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research mainly focuses on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, with a strong commitment to global historical approaches. Her work foregrounds marginalized and minoritized actors – such as orphans, non-Muslims, the Deaf, exiles, politically persecuted individuals – whose experiences illuminate broader structures of power, political violence, and racialized difference. She is the author of Türklüğü Ölçmek (Metis, 2005), Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse UP, 2014); Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I (Syracuse UP, 2019); Lives in Fragments: Self-Narrative Sources and Biographical Approaches to the Armenian Genocide (ed. with Eren Yetkin, Adnan Çelik, Berghahn, 2026). She is an Editorial Board Member of Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Journal of Women’s History, Journal of European Studies, and First World War Studies.

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