Yîbo | AKFF

Amsterdam Koerdisch Film Festival

Established in 1962, Turkey’s Regional Boarding Primary Schools (YİBO) were presented as a solution for children living in remote mountainous and scattered settlements without access to education. For decades, thousands of children were taken from their villages and placed in these state-run boarding schools across the country. Through the testimonies of former students, YİBO revisits the lived realities behind this official narrative. Combining personal accounts, archival material and haunting images of abandoned school buildings. The documentary reveals experiences marked by inequality, harsh discipline and the emotional cost of forced separation from family and community. For many Kurdish children, these schools also functioned as spaces of linguistic and cultural erasure, where speaking Kurdish and maintaining local identity were suppressed in favour of state-imposed nationalism. By confronting this hidden history, YİBO restores voices long silenced and contributes to a broader reckoning with memory, identity, and the enduring impact of assimilation policies on Kurdish society.