Silent Song

Silent Song (2001, 15-mins) is a performative documentary film about the exiled Kurdish singer and composer, Muhamed Abbas Bahram, one of many accomplished Kurdish musicians residing in Western Europe. The film’s title, Silent Song, alludes to a poem written in 1976 by a Kurdish radio and television broadcaster, commemorating Bharam’s refusal to perform in a concert at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad before an audience of Ba’ath party members. Following the translation of the poem into a musical score by Bharam, his resistant act is re-enacted on an Edinburgh Victorian stage, raising questions surrounding the re-construction of an historical event within a filmic present. Silent Song frames the position of the diasporic Kurdish musician as both social actor and performer in the context of the documentary’s reflexive use of broadcast, satellite and electronically mediated communication technologies, characteristic of an evolving Kurdish public sphere.