The Heavy Burden
The Heavy Burden by Yilmaz Özdil was one of the most popular shorts of last year. This unique film based on a real-life story has touched the hearts of viewers around the world. Attracting the attention of the international film scene, it was invited to 93 International festivals and won 23 awards.
The Heavy Burden tells the story of Avdel, a man who feeds his entire family from the salary of a donkey named Bozo. Advel and Bozo work in the sanitation service in the city of Mardin, Turkey. His nephew Salih, who fled Syria, also lives in Mardin with his uncle.
When Bozo is too old and is forced to retire by the municipality, Avdel must find a younger donkey to keep his job. To help his uncle, Salih crosses the Syrian border to bring back his own donkey which he was forced to leave when he escaped the war. But to accomplish this mission, he must cross the minefields.
The director Yılmaz Özdil is a Kurdish film filmmaker born in Hakkari (1979), in eastern Turkey. He did his master's degree at the Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University on the geopolitical border treatment in Kurdish cinema. In 2013 he defended his Ph.D. dissertation entitled The Visual Construction of Kurdish Identities in Cinema at the University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. From 2003 to 2014, he directed several documentary films and also worked as an assistant director in several films shot in Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, and France, notably with Yılmaz Erdoğan, Hiner Saleem, and Claude Weisz. He is currently working at Mardin Artuklu University as an assistant professor teaching Kurdish cinema and the representation of Kurds in cinema.
Website: https://www.baregiran.com