The Brooklyn Rail

One of the most poignant narratives in Overcoming (2023), a new documentary about peace activists in the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, is the story of two LGBTQ women who found love across the United Nations Buffer Zone which divides the island.

“The irony was that actually if you erase the border we live ten minutes apart,” Mamandia Constandinou, a Greek Cypriot, explained to the filmmakers about the distance between her home and that of her Turkish Cypriot partner. “So it was as if we were having a not-distant relationship in our own country. You can’t call it distant when it’s ten minutes.”

Cyprus is an island-nation beset with a frozen conflict for the past fifty years. Granted independence from the British Empire in 1960, Cyprus quickly fell under the pall of ethnic violence exchanged between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot populations. Turkish Cypriots retreated into armed enclaves, and in 1974, a coup backed by a dictatorship in Athens prompted a devastating Turkish military invasion and the sustained occupation of the northern third of the island. Since then, the island has been divided between the Greek Cypriot-dominated Republic of Cyprus and the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus,” an unrecognized state whose claim is only endorsed by Turkey.

For a generation it was almost impossible for Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots to interact across the militarized Buffer Zone, but in 2003 Turkish Cypriot protests provoked the opening of crossing points that allowed Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots to visit the other side of the island for the first time since the war.

Since then, twenty years have passed under this new status quo, and many younger Cypriots have grown up taking this new normalcy for granted. However, the checkpoints were temporarily closed during the pandemic, reminding peace activists that the situation is far from permanent and can change at any moment.

“We kind of normalize [the checkpoints],” Besire Paralik, the film’s director said, explaining that “because of the psychology of being able to cross the other side of your country, it became part of your everyday life.”

That sense of complacency, and the lack of education about the crossing points on both sides of the island, were two of the key motivations for Paralik, who co-wrote the 58-minute film with producer Firuzan Nalbantoğlu. The pair crafted and edited the film on a shoestring 500-euro budget, provided by the Embassy of the Netherlands in Cyprus. The film has been featured in festivals on the island and just premiered in Berlin, the first of several screenings the Turkish Cypriot filmmakers are organizing across Europe.

“The younger generation … [has] this idea that the barricades were always here and they were always able to cross,” Nalbantoğlu added, explaining that discussion of the barricades opening in 2003 is absent from history books on both sides of the island. “They don’t know. We cannot blame them.”

The documentary also differs from most existing narratives on the conflict because it foregrounds the stories of people who are often left out of the main Cyprus problem narrative: women and the LGBTQ community, often marginalized in the paternalistic Mediterranean culture of Cyprus.

“I believe that women and the LGBT community are missing from the negotiations or any type of efforts for the solution of the Cyprus problem on the official level, because we live in an inherently, deeply, and pathologically patriarchal society,” Greek Cypriot peace activist and theater director Ellada Evangelou said in the documentary.

For Turkish Cypriot poet and peace activist Neşe Yaşin, another subject interviewed in the documentary, Turkish Cypriot leaders would vilify her efforts in the press. “They would belittle me as a woman,” Yaşin said. “They said things I could not repeat.”

“The authorized history deliberately ignores such sources,” Paralik said, who, like Nalbantoğlu, identifies as queer. “We are always exposed to male-[dominated] history … we wanted to break this, talk from our side.”

The documentary spotlights a variety of figures, including a Turkish Cypriot conscientious objector who sought asylum in the Republic of Cyprus to avoid mandatory service in the Turkish military, and a pair of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot pen-pals who met and befriended each other at a college admissions exam run by the Goethe Institute, an NGO located within the Buffer Zone.

“What we discovered during this film [is that] there are lots of stories of bicommunal struggle we haven’t heard before,” Paralik said. “And I’m not talking about a hundred years ago or something, they just happened in the 1990s—you cannot find it anywhere. You really need to communicate with these people.”

The documentary uncovers stories of peace activists from both communities who organized before the checkpoints opened. “Communication prior to 2003 had already started intensely,” Yaşin said in the documentary. “Because, there was one thing that could not be stopped, and that was the internet!” Activists also met in the neutral site of Pyla, a village located within the UN Buffer Zone, or in other countries.

Despite the lack of resources, Paralik’s direction is dynamic and innovative, incorporating archival footage of protests and guerilla-style photography of the checkpoints, as well as more recent events, such as a protest in 2023 when a group of Greek Cypriots demanded to be allowed to bring aid supplies across the checkpoint in support of victims of the earthquake in the Turkish city of Adıyaman. The interview subjects were shot from moving cars, from scenic cafe vantages in the old city of Nicosia, the island’s bifurcated capital, or during golden hour on rooftops, facing the Pentadaktylos mountain range. One sequence features the evocative ruins of Varosha, an abandoned resort town, and another in the ruined streets of the Buffer Zone in Nicosia. The photography of the Buffer Zone was achieved with permission from the UN authorities, but according to Paralik and Nalbantoğlu, the production of this scene was not without conflict, as a Greek Cypriot national guardsman on patrol accosted them and demanded they delete the footage. The incident put the pair on a watchlist at the Greek Cypriot checkpoints, and now they are forced to wait about fifteen minutes every time they cross the Buffer Zone in Nicosia.

“[The guardsman] really wanted us to suffer,” Paralik said. “Every time we are suffering whenever we try to cross.” The episode also helped the filmmakers understand the urgency and importance of their project. “I remember how sad I felt,” Nalbantoğlu said. “I felt very sad this thing happened to me in my country.”

Despite the often-heated nature of the Cyprus problem, Nalbantoğlu reported that many Cypriots have been supportive of their initiative, successfully crowdsourcing small translations for their Instagram feed so that they could promote the film in English, Turkish, and Greek. “We announced that we need small translations,” Nalbantoğlu said, “and immediately, Instagram was just blowing [up], people are texting ‘we can help.’”

Some of the documentary’s interviewees, such as Constandinou, expressed hope for a solution in Cyprus. “Peace in Cyprus will happen and is actually already happening, already building at least around me,” Constandinou said. “It will be between us people, mixing up, interacting, friendships, relationships, whateverships … the past twenty years is proof that we can live in peace.”

Taken together, Nalbantoğlu hopes their film demonstrates that Cyprus can change independent of political and geopolitical interventions.

“Cyprus is not just an island in the Eastern Mediterranean that has a problem that can’t be solved because we are just a bunch of problematic, unruly Mediterraneans,” Nalbantoğlu said. “I want people to understand that we are trying in every possible way. It is not just in the hands of some politicians or colonialists to decide. But actually, we can do it.”