On November 11, 2026, Özgür Çiçek, Zara Masrour and Beri Shalmashi will be in conversation at the Kurdish Studies Forum on The Force of Minor Cinema. The conversation takes place at 2:00 pm in the AUIS Conference Hall.

Özgür Çiçek is a film scholar, researcher, and lecturer in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include national and transnational cinemas, minor cinemas with a particular emphasis on Kurdish cinema, documentary film studies, memory and archive studies, and film aesthetics. Last year, she co-edited Audiovisual Healing and Reparation: Recuperative Affect of Mediation. Her forthcoming monograph, contracted with Edinburgh University Press, is titled Kurdish Cinema in Turkey: Indigeneity, Imprisonment, and the Archive.

Zara Masrour was born and raised in Rojhilat (Eastern Kurdistan) and later moved to the Netherlands, where she began a new path in film studies. She holds an MA in Film and Contemporary Audiovisual Media from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and currently works as a programmer for the London Kurdish Film Festival. As a film researcher and cultural programmer, her work and writing explore stateless cinema, migration, identity, belonging, and Kurdish culture.

Beri Shalmashi is a Dutch Kurdish filmmaker, writer and cultural director. Her work often explores questions of identity, displacement, memory and political history, and the ways personal stories intersect with larger historical narratives. She is the creator of “Big Village”, an award-winning interactive documentary that uses personal testimony, archival material and digital storytelling to reconstruct the history and memory of the headquarters of the KDPI, an Iranian Kurdish political movement, located across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan. The project reflects on a time she witnessed as a newborn and on her wider interest in what happens when histories are fragmented, inaccessible or absent from official archives. She explores how new forms of storytelling can create alternative spaces for memory and knowledge. Shalmashi works across fiction, documentary and interactive media and is a prominent public voice on Kurdish rights, representation and political history. Her films and projects include “Mama”, “Shouted from the Rooftops”, “Casting Call” and the documentary “At the Edge of the Revolution”. Alongside her filmmaking practice, she mentors, writes and is director of Avanti, a platform for culture, dialogue and social change in the Netherlands.