KSSO is proud to present the award wining film

Friday 4th April 2008, 7:00 pm
Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS , Russell Square, London

Nearest station Russell Square on Piccadilly line

Everyone Welcome + Free Entry

FRATRICIDE – BRAKUJÎ

(in Kurdish, German and Turkish, with English subtitles)

Running time: 96 minutes

Shemo, a Kurdish immigrant and pimp living in Germany, offers to pay for his younger brother Azad to come and join him. Reluctantly, Azad accepts his brother's offer and makes the long journey from his poverty-stricken homeland. He moves in to an asylum for refugees where, amidst hopeless squalor he befriends Ibo, an eleven-year-old Kurdish orphan. A powerful and tender bond grows between the two boys, but the odds are against them.

Ahmet and Zeki are young second-generation Turks. Frustrated, unemployed, alienated from their heritage and with no place in German society, their anger simmers at fever pitch. Meanwhile they devote themselves to petty crime and their savage pit bulls. When these four doomed exiles meet, their encounter unleashes a nightmarish cycle of violence they believed they had left behind.

Boasting astonishing performances from a largely non-professional cast, Fratricide is an explosive tale of desperate conflict and bloody revenge, a savage, furious, and heartbreaking portrait of raw humanity struggling for safety, for dignity, for survival in the face of violence, exile and the brutal indifference of a society that wants no part of them.

Writer/director Yilmaz Arslan, a Kurd born on April 20, 1968 in Turkey, has lived in Germany since he was seven. In 1992, he made his debut film, Langer Gang, for which he subsequently won many awards. By his second film, Yara (1999) (which also won many awards), he was simultaneously carrying out the roles of director, writer and producer. The same is true of his 2005 film Fratricide.