Kurdish artist Cemile Sahin wins the 2023 Circa Prize.

Cemile Sahin, a Kurdish multimedia artist living and working in Berlin, has won the 2023 CIRCA prize for her film Four Ballads for my Father – Spring (2022). The artist, whose work spans film, photography, sculpture, and literature, conceived her film in direct response to the competition’s theme of “hope.”

The prize ceremony, in which Sahin was awarded a new CIRCA prize trophy designed by Ai Weiwei, took plae last night and broadcast live in a 20-minute ceremony screened on London’s Piccadilly Light. The artist will receive £30,000 (US$37,000) to support her projects, specifically for work slated to premiere on the CIRCA platform in 2024.

Four Ballads for my Father – Spring (2022), a two-and-a-half-minute film, documents the story of a Kurdish family split between Paris and Istanbul. Incorporating Kurdish television footage and film from family records, the film explores the Southeastern Anatolia Project, a controversial dam construction that has impacted Kurdish communities in Turkey.

“Making a film means hope,” Sahin says. “Making a contribution to this precarious cinema means hope. Above all, it is ‘hope’ that tells the stories in a language that belongs to 40 million people, although the Kurdish language was forbidden in Turkey. Speaking comes with hope and becomes cinema: that this can be narrated in a film and thus be preserved.”

For the third iteration of the CIRCA prize, over 1,000 films were screened for consideration, and 30 finalists were chosen from more than 20 countries. A jury of CIRCA artists and other long-term collaborators, such as Anne Imhof, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Shirin Neshat, and Michèle Lamy (who also hosted the event), selected the final award.