The border and the loop: symbolic geography and revolutionary mythmaking in the cinema of Kazım Öz

This article provides the first scholarly analysis of Kazım Öz’s Fotograf (2001), Bahoz (2008), and Zer (2017) as a cohesive trilogy, titled here East of the Euphrates. It argues that the trilogy functions as a subversive counter-history through the road movie form, challenging Turkish state-sponsored nationalism and militarism by constructing a symbolic geography where the Euphrates River and the eastward journey become metaphors for Kurdish identity, resistance, and collective memory. However, the article also advances a dialectical critique: while Öz’s project is politically courageous and cinematically innovative, it simultaneously reproduces essentialist binaries, didactic frameworks, and a romanticised politics that constrain its emancipatory potential. Through close textual analysis, genre study, and ideological critique, the article examines the trilogy’s treatment of anti-colonial discourse, its systematic semiotics of state violence, and its alignment with European road cinema conventions. It concludes that the trilogy’s power lies in its unflinching confrontation with erasure and assimilation, yet its rigid moral cartography and underdeveloped character interiority ultimately substitute doctrinal certainty for the open-ended exploration that the road genre promises. In doing so, the article situates Öz’s work as a radical yet contested cinematic intervention within Kurdish political filmmaking and transnational cinema studies.