The
ethnic cleansing of Kurds in Turkey, one of the great human rights
disasters of the 20th Century, has been largely unreported in the
U.S. media. This conflict also employs the greatest use of U.S.
weapons anywhere in the world. This film assails the selectivity
of the network news, critiques U.S. foreign policy, and exposes
ironic inconsistencies in Washington's treatment of the ethnic Kurs
in Iraq versus the ethnic Kurds in Turkey.
Independent
journalist Kevin McKiernan's journey to capture this story took
more than nine years; he filmed many of the war scenes on the Iraqi-Turkish
border. McKiernan has captured one-of-a-kind war zone footage of
the conflict, inter-cut with a domestic story about a Kurdish family
trying to find its way in Santa Barbara. Legendary cinematographer
Heskell Wexler shot the domestic sequences.
Tidbit:
"About 80% of the Turkish arsenal is U.S.-made Turkish army has
relied on Sikorsky Blackhawks and both Apache and Cobra gunships
to win the long war with the Kurdish rebels…So far more than 3,000
Kurdish villages have been burned; estimates of civilian Kurds displaced
by the war range from 500,000 to 2 million." -Kevin McKiernan, Los
Angeles Times, March 3, 2000
Bio: Kevin
McKiernan is an attorney turned filmmaker/journalist. A former radio
correspondent for the NPR Program All Things Considered, McKiernan
is the recipient of two Armstrong awards for excellence in radio
documentaries. In 1990, McKiernan co-produced "The Spirit of Crazy
Horse" for the PBS program Frontline-which included footage he shot
at Wounded Knee in 1973. Since 1982, his area of concentration has
been foreign news. McKiernan's footage and reports have been broadcast
by NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes, and ABC World News Tonight-and
he has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
The
ethnic cleansing of Kurds in Turkey, one of the great human rights
disasters of the 20th Century, has been largely unreported in the
U.S. media. This conflict also employs the greatest use of U.S.
weapons anywhere in the world. This film assails the selectivity
of the network news, critiques U.S. foreign policy, and exposes
ironic inconsistencies in Washington's treatment of the ethnic Kurs
in Iraq versus the ethnic Kurds in Turkey.
Independent
journalist Kevin McKiernan's journey to capture this story took
more than nine years; he filmed many of the war scenes on the Iraqi-Turkish
border. McKiernan has captured one-of-a-kind war zone footage of
the conflict, inter-cut with a domestic story about a Kurdish family
trying to find its way in Santa Barbara. Legendary cinematographer
Heskell Wexler shot the domestic sequences. 
Kevin
McKiernan is an attorney turned filmmaker/journalist. A former radio
correspondent for the NPR Program All Things Considered, McKiernan
is the recipient of two Armstrong awards for excellence in radio
documentaries. In 1990, McKiernan co-produced "The Spirit of Crazy
Horse" for the PBS program Frontline-which included footage he shot
at Wounded Knee in 1973. Since 1982, his area of concentration has
been foreign news. McKiernan's footage and reports have been broadcast
by NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes, and ABC World News Tonight-and
he has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.