Description:

Join the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program for a screening of the documentary YİBO followed by a discussion with directors Şükran Demir and Özgür Ünal on Wednesday, February 25th at 12:30pm in Harris Hall 108 and via Zoom. This is the second documentary screening in the series “Witness, Archive, Evidence: Documentary Cinema and the Politics of Memory in Turkey." Lunch will be provided! 

Register for Zoom: https://bit.ly/4khZhIh

Register for In-Person: https://bit.ly/45MCjmA

YİBO: Discipline, Testimony, and the Archive of Assimilationist Education

YİBO is a 47-minute documentary built around the testimonies of former students who were educated in Boarding Regional Primary Schools (Yatılı İlköğretim Bölge Okulları, YİBO for short) across Turkey between 1962 and 2010. Founded under the promise of educational access for rural children, these institutions emerge in the film as sites where education, discipline, and assimilationist state policies converged. Through interviews with former students, the documentary traces everyday life inside the boarding system: separation from families, rigid disciplinary regimes, and the lasting effects of institutional control on childhood and memory. These testimonies reveal how inequality and coercion were normalized within educational practice.

A central focus of YİBO is linguistic and cultural assimilation. Kurdish students recount being denied education in their mother tongue, prohibited from speaking their own language, and forced to navigate schooling through imposed linguistic hierarchies. The film shows how schooling functioned not only as education, but as a technology for reshaping cultural identity. The documentary also situates YİBOs within a militarized logic of governance. Students describe school life structured through strict hierarchies and punitive discipline, echoing military organization and authority. In this sense, YİBOs appear as institutional intersections of pedagogy, surveillance, and militarism.

Directors' Bios

Şükran Demir holds a BA in History (2014) and an MA (2024), with her graduate research focusing on Turkey’s education policies toward minorities, particularly the Zoğrafyon Greek High School. She is the co-author of an e-book on Yatılı İlköğretim Bölge Okulları (YİBO). She serves on the board of the Women’s Time Association (Kadın Zamanı Derneği) and previously took an active role in Hafıza Merkezi’s Memory and Youth program as both a participant and a peer mentor. She is currently conducting research on mother-tongue rights as part of Hafıza Merkezi’s Justice Heals project. She continues her work in the field of cinema, drawing on the film education she has received.

Özgür Ünal is currently in the final year of his law degree. He is the author of an e-book on Yatılı İlköğretim Bölge Okulları (YİBO). He has carried out volunteer work with various civil society organizations and is actively involved with the Lawyers for Freedom Association (Özgürlük için Hukukçular Derneği, ÖHD). He took an active role in Hafıza Merkezi’s Memory and Youth program as both a participant and a peer mentor. He is currently conducting research on mother-tongue rights as part of Hafıza Merkezi’s Justice Heals project. He continues her work in the field of cinema, drawing on the film education he has received.

Documentary Series: “Witness, Archive, Evidence: Documentary Cinema and the Politics of Memory in Turkey”

Witness, Archive, Evidence: Documentary Cinema and the Politics of Memory in Turkey is a screening-and-conversation series that brings together four documentaries tracing how violence, inequality, and displacement are lived, and contested, through institutions and everyday life. Moving across courtrooms and case files, borderlands and militarized landscapes, boarding schools and assimilationist discipline, and post-earthquake precarity and minority survival, these films ask what counts as evidence when harm is denied, normalized, or bureaucratically managed. Centering testimony, archival traces, and embodied memory, the series explores documentary cinema as a mode of public witnessing: one that not only records aftermaths of state power, but also illuminates the ongoing struggles for rights, recognition, and justice. Each screening is followed by a conversation with the directors.