The Town That Drove Away – Films

Miasto, które wyjechało

Grzegorz Piekarski & Natalia Pietsch
Poland | 2025 | 70 min
World premiere
Languages : Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish
Subtitles : English, French

Special Youth Jury Award for a Medium Length Film offered by École Moser

The historic village of Hasankeyf, a Kurdish majority settlement, is ordered to relocate after plans are made to build a dam. The stark beauty of the Anatolian landscape frames the devastated buildings, the site of a political game requiring obedience and submission. When all has disappeared, only a bitter and unsettling sense of dignity will remain.

The South-East Anatolia project, led by the Turkish government since 1975, aims to build around twenty dams in the region, forcing 350,000 inhabitants, mostly Kurdish, to leave their homes. The historic village of Hasankeyf is one of these. Gradually reduced to dust in anticipation of its imminent flooding, it saw its population forcibly relocated two kilometres away to New Hasankeyf, a modern, soulless housing estate made up of identical dwellings. The castle in the historic village was dismantled to be rebuilt further away, and the ordinary buildings demolished, leaving a few remnants here and there that will serve as tourist attractions once submerged. The raw beauty of Anatolia's landscapes mingles with its devastated neighbourhoods, the scene of a political game that demands submission and obedience, dispossessing single men of their property rights and shepherds of their livestock. When all is gone, when everything has been ripped away from them, what remains is a bitter sense of dignity, and a few unbreakable family ties.

Bastien Bento

Natalia Pietsch
The Town That Drove Away, 2025
I've Got Something For You Too, 2019
The Frog King, 2018
Euphoria, 2017

Grzegorz Piekarski
The Town That Drove Away, 2025
Slave, 2021
Pasdar, 2017