A social media post about the film has been considered evidence of “propaganda for a terrorist organisation” by a prosecutor in Turkey’s south-eastern city of Malatya, and the indictment has been lodged with the court, MA reports,
Nazım Bayram, who shared information about the 2018 film Girls of the Sun (original title Les filles du Soleil) on his social media account on 5 May, was initially detained, but released pending trial after making a statement to the police.
His trial is due to start on 9 September at the Malatya Criminal Court.
The prosecutor claims that his post constituted propaganda for the Women’s Defence Units (YPJ) which he asserts is an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) classified by Turkey and the European Union as a “terrorist organisation”.
Making propaganda “to legitimise an organisation’s methods involving force, violence and threat, or to promote such methods” is punishable with a three-year prison sentence in Turkish criminal law, and the sentence increases if the act is committed through media.
Girls of the Sun tells the story of Bahar, a lawyer-turned-freedom-fighter in northern Syria whose son is taken hostage by ISIS, and Mathilde, a French journalist working to cover the story of Bahar and her Kurdish army, known as the ‘Girls of the Sun’.
Highlighting the freedom struggle of an all-female unit of former ISIS captives and how thousands of Yazidi women captured by ISIS in 2014 managed to escape slavery, the film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018.
Golshifteh Farahani, an Iranian actress plays Bahar, the commander of the female fighters, while Emmanuelle Bercot plays Mathilde, the French journalist. Bercot is a French actress who won the award for Best Actress at Cannes in 2015 with Mon Roi.
