«Dobbiamo fare di più perché lo sappiamo
che Hasankeyf é un documento per la civiltá,
un documento di 12000 anni di storia».
Synopsis
Hasankeyf, south eastern Turckey. An ancient village doomed to be submerged under 30 metres of water due to the building of a dam. A river, the Tigris. 5000 inhabitants should go away, leaving their land, the land of their fathers, of their ancestors. Hasankeyf is an ancient village on the Tigris river, in the Mesopotamia of the Assyrian and of the Byzantine, the place where the central Asian and Persian cultures crossed with the Europeans.Today 5000 inhabitants, most Kurdish, live in Hasankeyf: a community that lives as suspended in time, since when, in the 195, the Ilisu dam project was born.
The Ilisu dam in activity, once completed, would submerge Hasankeyf under 30 metres of water.
But the life in Hasankeyf continues as nothing has to happen.
The children play in the river, the men take care of the animals, the young ladies go every evening milking the ships on the shores of the Tigris, the small restaurants wait for the tourists that reach Hasankeyf during the year.
There is not job in Hasankeyf.
The perspectives of life are limited to the poverty of the village.
No one wants to invest in a tourism economy if the village would still be flooded in few years.
While somewhere else someone is deciding the sort of this place, a whole community lives in a limbo, with not enough news about his destiny and with a exhausting indecision about what to do.
HASANKEYF, WAITING LIFE tell a story of a big conflict living the daily life, where the history collides with modernity, national interests with the local ones, the necessity of personal growth with the preservation of the own roots.
