Shot over a fifteen-year period from 2004 to 2019, Her Bijî Granî (“Viva Granî”) is a close look at the convergence of folkloric tradition, overdriven sound aesthetics, political consciousness, and youth subculture in the landscape of Kurdish wedding circuits in Southeastern and South Turkey. The film combines charged music and dance events captured in a rockumentary style with musicians’ accounts of the evolution of the genre alternately known as granî or ağır delilo, which emerged in the first years of the twenty-first century, emanating from Diyarbakir province to industrial centers of Kurdish migration along Turkey’s eastern Mediterranean seaboard and more recently to Europe, encapsulating the mood of Kurdish communities and the need for a social outlet and space of belonging for working class Kurdish youth.

George Mürer is a researcher (currently adjuncting at Columbia University) who specializes in intersections between music and culture in Kurdistan, Khorasan, and the Gulf and Indian Ocean regions. His doctoral dissertation (and now monograph in the making) concerned the patronage networks and fluid cross-cultural intersections that mark the musical, literary, and ritual life of Baloch communities in the cosmopolitan urban centers of the Eastern Arabian Peninsula, from Muscat to Muharrag to Kuwait. His multimodal scholarship actively incorporates documentary filmmaking, working with musicians to reach broader audiences for their cultural advocacy, and ethnographic attention to digital domains of culture production and exchange.

This film screening is free and open the public.