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August 22, 2025 – Iraq/Kurdistan –
In the wake of journalist Gülistan Tara’s tragic death by Turkish drone strike in August 2023, Kurdish media innovators are honoring her legacy through powerful visual storytelling.
A commemorative documentary, Gulistan Tara: Ronahiya Rastiyê (“The Light of Truth”), crafted by Ali Güler, premieres on Stêrk TV on August 23, 2025 — exactly two years after Tara’s death. The film vividly traces Tara’s journalistic journey from her origins in Batman to her reporting across Rojava and Bashur, featuring intimate interviews with colleagues and family. Güler underscores that Tara’s story reflects the enduring perils journalists face in war zones, particularly for Kurdish media workers who have been targeted across decades — from past village destruction reporting to today’s deadly bombings.
In parallel, the “Martyr Gulistan Tara Documentary Commune” has launched an ambitious 90-episode docuseries, From Genocide to a Free Life – The Kurdish Resurrection, examining the history of the Kurdish freedom movement and offering an in-depth portrayal of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan. It premiered on April 2, 2025, in Kurmanji on Stêrk TV and in Turkish on Medya Haber TV, with full episodes subsequently made available — complete with English subtitles — via the commune’s YouTube channel and its own platforms. The series, born of over eight years of cross-regional research involving hundreds of interviews and archival documents, unfolds across three seasons: Öcalan’s early life and armed struggle inception, his kidnapping and incarceration, and the movement’s trajectory through 2015.
Both projects exemplify a vibrant, transnational trend in contemporary Kurdish documentary filmmaking, where creators across Kurdistan’s four regions and the diaspora produce narratives of exile, identity, and resistance. These works challenge mainstream erasure and are shared through TV, festivals, and digital platforms, despite external censorship efforts.
Together, these documentaries revive Tara’s urgent call for truth-telling and fortify the historical memory of the Kurdish struggle. More than media, they are acts of justice — ensuring that both a fallen journalist’s courage and a collective history of resistance remain vividly alive.
Reference –
From Genocide to a Free Life: Docuseries on Kurdish freedom movement premieres
Stêrk TV broadcasts documentary about journalist Gulistan Tara
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