I Wrote the Truth: The Notebook of Lice (Min rastî nivîsand – Deftera Licê)

Ahmet Tektaş has kept a diary since 1945. Over the decades, the notebook of this 83-year-old man from Lice, in the Kurdish south-east of Turkey, has become a historical record in its own right.

I Wrote the Truth, by Kurdish director Ersin Çelik, follows the events Tektaş witnessed and wrote down: the 1975 earthquake, unsolved political killings, the evacuation and burning of villages, and the burning of Lice town centre by the Turkish army in 1993.

Through one man’s notebook, the film opens a window on a history that the state has never fully acknowledged.