Manus Island and Kurdistan in Juxtaposition

Abstract

This chapter draws attention to the ways Remain (2018) and Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (2017) rearrange the political geographies of both Kurdistan and Manus Islands, by drawing two formally discrete political systems, cultures and (colonial) histories into juxtaposition. The films, both co-produced by Behrouz Boochani with his collaborators Hoda Afshar (Remain) and Arash Kamali Sarvestani (Chauka), deftly weave together the histories and ‘presents’ of the Kurds and Manusians to render visible the ways that these distant places have been violently imbricated through the establishment of the Manus Prison. The analysis offered in this chapter, enabled by my own positionality as a Kurdish-Iranian woman, highlights the ways that a Kurdish perspective can reveal the wider geopolitical scope of these films, which extends far beyond the Manus prison, across the Pacific Ocean, to the mountains of Kurdistan. Drawing on my own experience of watching the films, I elucidate the Kurdish cultural and political elements at work in Remain and Chauka. I do this by drawing attention to images and sounds that evoke Kurdish history and identity, which are not (or might not) be fully apprehended by the non-Kurdish audience.