You drive me mad
2016 · 4m · Germany
Directed by Dave Lojek
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Kurdish-Iraqi poet and actor Zeravan Khalil hikes through an Alpine gorge with his dog after fleeing IS violence, composing a poem in Kurmanji Kurdish to process the atrocities he survived before reaching a hopeful path through central Europe.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the refugee narrative to *perform* trauma—instead Lojek lets Khalil walk silently through a gorge, composing in his own language, which is a quietly radical refusal of the confession-booth documentary. The subversion isn't flashy, but it's there.
The film locates itself in a specific lineage of lyric documentary—Agnès Varda, James Blue—where the poet's voice and the landscape enter into genuine dialogue rather than illustration; the restraint in editing mirrors the restraint in Khalil's own compositional process.
The decision to let Khalil compose and recite in Kurmanji—untranslated, unhurried—is what transforms this from well-intentioned refugee portrait into something that actually trusts the viewer's patience and the weight of his own language to carry the entire emotional truth.