Translating Ulysses (dir. Aylin Kuryel & Fırat Yücel) is a documentary that follows Kurdish writer Kawa Nemir as he undertakes the seemingly impossible task of translating James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece into Kurdish, a language long suppressed and marginalized in Turkey. Working in exile, he gathers words, idioms, and memories, turning translation into a collective act of preserving and reinventing a language under pressure.

This screening and the following discussion with the directors invite the participants to think of translation not as simple transfer, but as a site where language, power, and history intersect. What does it mean for a text to live on in another language? What happens when translation refuses smoothness and insists on difference? And how does the act of translating work when a language itself has been denied visibility, legitimacy, or even existence?

Framed as a masterclass, the post-film Q and A, and discussion with the directors, will explore translation as both an aesthetic practice and a political intervention, asking how languages survive, transform, and re-emerge through acts of writing, reading, and translating.

Aylin Kuryel is an Assistant Professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research areas are nationalism, image politics, aesthetics/resistance, and the politics of emotions. She is the (co-)editor of The Future of Cultural Analysis: A Critical Inquiry (Amsterdam University Press, 2025), Utanca Bakmak (Looking at Shame, Cogito, 2023), Sıkıntı Var (Essays on Boredom, İletişim Press, 2020), Küresel Ayaklanmalar Çağında Direniş ve Estetik (Resistance and Aesthetics in the Age of Global Uprisings, İletişim Press, 2015), and Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010). She has been involved in projects as an artist and is working as a documentary filmmaker. Among her documentaries are The City and the Messiah (2024), Translating Ulysses (2023), A Defense (2021), CemileSezgin (2020), The Balcony and Our Dreams (2020), Heads and Tails (2018), Welcome Lenin (2016). She is part of the Image Acts Collective (https://www.imageacts.com/).

Fırat Yücel is a documentary filmmaker and editor based in Amsterdam and Istanbul. He produces essayistic documentaries and curates video series for Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema in Istanbul. His films include Only Blockbusters Left Alive (2016), Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater (2016), Heads and Tails (2019), March 8, 2020: A Memoir (2023), and Translating Ulysses (2023). He served as artistic director of the anthology Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship (2024), which premiered internationally at the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam and was screened at MoMA Doc Fortnight and CPH:DOX. He was a fellow at BAK Utrecht’s Fellowship for Situated Practice (2023–2024). His latest short, happiness (2025), premiered at Visions du Réel and is part of a trilogy on desktop cinema.

Schedule:
15:00-16:30: film screening
16:30-18:00: Masterclass Discussion/Q and A with directors

Credit Requirements

rMA students who attend and participate in the masterclass are eligible to receive 1 EC. In order to receive this credit, they will have to: (1) complete the reading (two essays); (2) attend the film screening and participate in the Q and A with the directors on the day; and (3) submit a one-page document containing their reflections on the film, as informed by the theoretical and contextual issues contained in the reading.

For further information, to register for the masterclass, and to receive the reading material, please contact Nicholas Carr (n.d.carr@uva.nl).