Yunus Emre InstituteYunus Emre Enstitüsü – London, in collaboration with Birkbeck, University of London, hosted a special screening of the award-winning documentary Kut al Amara – From Tale to Truth, written and directed by Koray Demir, at Birkbeck University Cinema on Friday, 28 November 2025.
The evening opened with welcoming remarks by Dr. Janet McCabe, Reader in Television and Film Studies, Director of the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image (BIMI), and Programme Director of MA Film Programming and Curating. Dr. McCabe highlighted the importance of screening films that shed light on underexplored histories and praised the collaboration between BIMI and Yunus Emre Enstitüsü for bringing thought-provoking works to academic and public audiences.
The screening drew significant interest from academics, students, and members of London’s cultural community. Following the film, director Koray Demir and film scholar Prof. Nezih Erdoğan held an engaging Q&A session, offering deeper insight into the documentary’s historical framework, visual language, and approach to collective memory. During the discussion, Demir reflected on how history can be manipulated to obscure political wrongdoing, noting that historians, like all individuals, are shaped by their era and the powers that influence them. He also spoke about the creative tension between the historian and the artist within the filmmaking process and emphasised the responsibility of confronting the legacies of past empires within a broader historical context.
The documentary revisits one of the most overlooked yet decisive episodes of the First World War: the 1916 Siege of Kut al-Amara, where the Ottoman army prevailed over British forces. Blending cinematic storytelling with rare archival material and first-hand testimonies, the film brings to light the human stories behind this largely forgotten victory and reflects on the collapse of a global power at the hands of a people long underestimated by history.
Developed over three years across seven countries — Türkiye, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the USA — the documentary is the product of extensive historical research and on-site fieldwork. Director Demir, who is also a historian, conducted expeditions to battlefields and heritage sites, collecting thousands of minutes of interviews with historians, journalists, and descendants of tribal leaders. Despite challenging and at times hazardous conditions, the team succeeded in capturing rare footage in Iraq, contributing to the film’s striking visual and emotional depth.
Kut al Amara – From Tale to Truth has garnered multiple international awards at film festivals throughout 2024 and 2025, earning praise for its historical rigour, cinematic language, and poetic narrative style.
The evening concluded with an in-depth discussion reflecting on the film’s significance, the politics of memory, and the role of documentary cinema in reexamining the legacy of the modern Middle East
