Newroz Baz

Mehmet, a young Turkish man newly migrated from the village Tire, takes a job searching for water leaks below the surface of the streets of Istanbul. Due to a strange set of events, he is mistaken for a Kurd, imprisoned, and brutally beaten. Upon his release a week later, he becomes an outcast marked as a Kurd, losing his apartment, his job, and eventually his girl friend, Arzu. When a Kurdish friend, Berzan is killed in a street protest triggered by a hunger strike, Mehmet takes a trek to return the body to Berzan's home village near the Iraqi border, and learns why so many Kurds are refugees.

A film about the state of people who are forced to live their exile as an outer event, but also as an inner destiny. That condition involves several time levels: a lost past, a disturbed present and a future rimmed with hope. In the village of Zara wandering souls are searching for things lost: letters, childhood, parents… Zara lies at the heart of an eternal search for a place of consolation and respite a search, during which memories and dreams gradually merge into an imagined present. (swissfilms.ch)

Revolving around an old man who refuses to leave his otherwise evacuated village in Kurdish Turkey, "Ax (The Land)" is a twenty-seven-minute long short film about the forced deportations of Kurdish villages by the Turkish military.