Restless Stones is an experimental documentary of simmering intensity: eerie, deeply absorbing, relentlessly searching, and fragmentary by design. 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? Images are scrutinized over and over, played in slow motion, zoomed in until only pixels remain, in an urgent yet daunting attempt to find answers.
"My need to see, to move ever closer, to bridge the distance, ultimately led to the dissolution of the image. The further I zoomed in, the more the pixels themselves became visible. They no longer show details, only flat areas. They reveal the moment when the image says: this far and no further. The pixel is the mosaic tile of the digital image: a tiny, indivisible fragment in which the whole can no longer be recognised. Zoomed to their limit, the pixels form a grid, patches of grey. But every stylistic device carries its own risks."
Ellen Vermeulen
