30 Years with Songs of Fraternity

Synopsis

A newspaper article describes the documentary as “a musical encyclopedia of the last thirty years of the country’s history, told through a band.” Founded in 1995 as part of the Boğaziçi Performing Arts Ensemble, Kardeş Türküler brought together the music of peoples of different languages, religions, and ethnic backgrounds living across Anatolia, including Mesopotamia and Thrace, and defended the will to live together through music. Beginning with Turkish and Kurdish, the group later added Armenian, Azerbaijani, Syriac, Arabic, Georgian, Laz, Romani, and Greek. Throughout this musical journey, Kardeş Türküler witnessed the political and social transformations of Turkey’s recent history while continuing to produce work connected to social struggles.

Director Biography

Çayan Demirel, Ayşe Çetinbaş

Çayan Demirel

Born in Istanbul in 1977. After he graduated from the faculty of economics, he started working on documentaries with oral history projects. In 2006, he completed his first documentary, about the Dersim Massacre, and then he founded Surela Film Production in 2009. After that, he directed the documentary, which tells the story of Sait Kırmızıtoprak, who was the MD and also one of the leaders of the Kurdish movement.

Ayşe Çetinbaş

Born in Germany in 1979. She completed her BA in Economics at Istanbul University and received her MA in European Public Policy at Greenwich University. She worked on various national and international documentary film productions. Between 2008 and 2014, she served on the executive board of the International 1001 Documentary Film Festival, held by BSB (the Association of Documentary Filmmakers in Turkey). She worked as a fixer and local producer for foreign media. She co- founded Surela Film Production with Çayan Demirel in 2008 and produced numerous documentaries. She recently finished her second feature documentary, Kardeş Türküler (Songs of Fraternity) in 2025.

Credits

Camera / Kamera

Koray Kesik

Editing / Kurgu

Özcan Vardar, Tatlıhan Tuncel, Erhan Örs

Music / Müzik

Kardeş Türküler

Sound / Ses

Gökçe İnce, Öğünç Hatipoğlu

Production / Yapım

Ayşe Çetinbaş, Gökçe İnce