Restless Stones - Ellen Vermeulen

In October 2015, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and insurgent Kurdish youth declared autonomy in key cities of Northern Kurdistan; this was met with brutal military repression by the Turkish army, leading to several months of deadly urban warfare. Ten years later, following the PKK’s historic decision to lay down its arms, Ellen Vermeulen revisits a few minutes of raw, handheld footage she filmed on her phone at the heart of the conflict in 2015, interweaving it with images recorded by local inhabitants and young Kurdish rebels. By dissecting the iconography of conflict – street commotions, funeral processions, portraits of war martyrs – Restless Stones confronts difficult questions: How do young men and women come to see martyrdom as a desirable path? How does violence continue to reverberate through people’s lives, even after many years?

Ellen Vermeulen (b. 1982) is a filmmaker, researcher, and teacher. Her work is characterised by a critical gaze and an in-depth exploration of social structures. With 9999 (2014), she made a documentary about internment in the Merksplas prison that was even screened at the European Court of Human Rights. For Catch-19to25 (2016) she filmed at the Reno refugee platform, and in her film Inclusief (2018), she turns her gaze to children with special educational needs attending mainstream schools. In her documentary Une femme qui part (2024) Vermeulen examines Marie-Louise Chapelle, the first French woman to climb an unclimbed mountain peak in the Himalayan mountains in 1952.