Journal articles on the topic 'Kurdish letters'

During recent decades, recognizing letters was a considerable discussion for artificial intelligence researchers and recognize letters due to the variety of languages and different approaches have many challenges. The Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are framed based on particular application such as recognition pattern and data classification through learning process is configured. So, it is a proper approach to recognize letters. Kurdish language has two popular handwritings based on Arabic and Latin. In this paper, Radial Basis Function (RBF) of ANNs is used to recognize Kurdish-Latin manuscripts. Although, the authors' proposed method is also used to recognize the letters of all Latin languages which include English, Turkish and etc. are used. The authors implement RBF of ANNs in MATLAB environment. In this paper, the efficiency criteria is supposed to minimize the Mean Square Error (MSE) to recognize Kurdish letters and maximize recognition accuracy of Kurdish letters in training and testing stage of RBF of ANNs. The recognition accuracy in training and testing stages are 100% and 96.7742%, respectively.

Language is a great tool to communicate and carry information. Moreover, it is used to express feeling and sentiment. These days sentiment analysis is one the most active field of research, to discover people's opinion about specific product, service or topic. The task of sentiment classification is to categories reviews of users as positive or negative from textual information of Social Networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Blogs to determine the feeling of majority about specific topics. Kurdish language suffer from the unique and standard writing rules, grammar syntax and alphabet. Therefore, Kurdish people write their feeling in social networks in different ways. Some of them prefer to use the Arabic script style while others prefer to use Latin letters to express their feeling, further some people use their different accents and syntax and even sometimes they use English letters write their emotion. Therefore, for the purpose of analytics for Kurdish sentiment analyses its proposed to use data mining classification techniques such as Naive Bayes classifier because of its strong independence assumption. In Experimental results, the Social Network comments are classified into positive or negative polarities. The accuracy of sentiment analysis is obtained 66% by using Naive Bayes classifier for unigram feature on Kurdish text dataset.

The literary scholar Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul (1934-2019) was one of the greatest Iraqi Kurdish scholars trained in the Soviet Union. He was one of a cohort of Iraqi students who received scholarships for study in the USSR in the wake of the 1958 coup that overthrew the Iraqi monarchy, and his time in the USSR coincided with the period of flourishing of Kurdish studies there. Rasul’s PhD dissertation analyzed the development of Kurdish literature within a schematic Marxist-Leninist developmental framework. In his major work, however, which focused on Ahmed Khani and his Mem û Zîn, he went well beyond the standard Soviet treatment of literary works and focused especially on the dimensions of Sufi theosophy and other Islamic content in the work. In this respect, Rasul’s work stands out as a rare exception in Soviet Oriental studies. It remains one of the most ambitious studies of the early modern Kurdish poet Khani.

The aim of the current study was to examine the effects of bilingualism on letter and category fluency tasks. Participants were 1,600 monolingual and bilingual children from three cities in Iran: Tehran (Persian monolinguals), Tabriz (Turkish–Persian bilinguals), and Sanandaj (Kurdish–Persian bilinguals). We separately presented nine Persian letters and thirty-one categories to the participants, and asked them to generate as many words as possible using each of these initial letters and categories within a maximum of three minutes. Bilingual children generated more words than monolingual children in the letter fluency task; this effect was more pronounced in Grade 1 and for Turkish–Persian bilinguals. However, Persian monolinguals generated significantly more words than both bilingual groups in the category fluency task. Thus, bilingualism can be of both advantage and disadvantage, and produce a dissociative effect. We discuss the results on the basis of the specific nature and different cognitive demands of letter and category fluency tasks. We suggest that the degree of language proficiency of bilinguals should be considered as an important variable in future research on bilingualism.

This research studies the frequently used strategies by Kurdish students when they express their apology in their mother tongue. The present study tries to address two questions related as to whether the participants in questions follow the same strategies classified by Sugimotos (1997) or not, as well as the impact of gender factor on these strategies. The corpus consists of responses to Discourse Completion Test (DCT), which includes five different situations. The informants have been 30 subjects: 15 male students and 15 female students. The informants were students at college of basic education, English department, 4th stage. The DCT is written in English and informants were asked to write their responses in Kurdish. The data collected have been descriptively analyzed according to the content, frequency, and order of semantic formulas used by Sugimotos (1997). Finally, the most used strategies are translated into English also the Kurdish responses were written in English letters. In order to arrive at statistical results, the percentage of the most frequently used strategy was counted.

PublicationsGareth Stansfield and Mohammed Shareef (eds), The Kurdish Question Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)J. R. Osborn, Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)Conference18th IUAES World Congress, ‘Word (of) Encounters: The Past, Present and Future of Anthropological Knowledge’, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil, 16–20 July 2018

Automatic recognition of spoken letters is one of the most challenging tasks in the area of speech recognition system. In this paper, different machine learning approaches are used to classify the Kurdish alphabets such as SVM and k-NN where both approaches are fed by two different features, Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). Moreover, the features are combined together to learn the classifiers. The experiments are evaluated on the dataset that are collected by the authors as there as not standard Kurdish dataset. The dataset consists of 2720 samples as a total. The results show that the MFCC features outperforms the LPC features as the MFCCs have more relative information of vocal track. Furthermore, fusion of the features (MFCC and LPC) is not capable to improve the classification rate significantly.

Language learning is a set of techniques and methods used together to teach fundamentals of a language, including writing, reading, listening and comprehension. Usually begins by teaching letters. The purpose of this research was to initiate a scientific approach using serious games in order to discover a proper way to learn Kurdish language by writing approach. We studied related fields i.e. level of using technology with elementary school students, the method of teaching Kurdish language in the Kurdistan educational system and the students' enthusiasm for gaming. The outcome of the field-study shows there is a big gap between the current state and capacity of technology and serious game. Serious game is a composition of entertainment game with learning methods to help learning easy. We make the hypothesis that the game encourages pupils to learn rapidly. We aimed to prove a method that students start language learning by writing. In addition, there was no any serious game for learning Kurdish which it has two different alphabets and four main dialects. In this paper, we worked on Arami[1] alphabets and south dialect (Sorani). We created an algorithm and a prototype to test our hypothesis. Our prototype is simple and easy to use, but at the same time it is dynamic that a teacher or parent can generate different game. A user might have a profile and result saves in a database. It helps supervisors to assess progress of learning and diagnosis of mistakes.

Abstract Pascale Casanova’s notion of the “world republic of letters” systematically transcends national boundaries, as well as the opposition between internalist structural analyses and externalist political reductions, arguing that individual works of literature acquire their meaning only against the background of this transnational literary field with its own, irreducibly literary forms of domination. Yet, I will argue, Casanova’s work is not yet sufficiently transnational and not sufficiently historicizing; specifically, it overlooks non-Western cosmopolitan traditions and premodern vernacularization processes. As a case study, I will discuss the vernacularization of Georgian, Kurdish, and Armenian within the Persianate cosmopolitan, and on the consecration of national epics in these three languages. These examples suggest an approach to the literary field that allows for greater geographical width and historical depth; it also invites us to look for more radical historical variability in the concept of literature itself.

The letter provides a brief overview of the evolution of the United Nations’ treatment of the Kurdish question. It traces the issue from Rizgari Kurd’s formal appeal to the UN General Assembly in 1946 for Kurdish self-determination to the UN disapproval of Iraqi Kurdistan’s referendum of independence. The paper points one more time to the fundamental inconsistency between the UN principles of self-determination and territorial integrity.

AbstractThis article is an historical ethnography of the popular conceptualizations of crowd behavior during the pogroms against the Armenians in the Ottoman East in 1895–1896. It draws on contemporary sources like official telegrams, governmental reports, letters of American missionaries, and Armenian periodicals to show that observers with otherwise highly conflicting views described the structure of the event in the exact same way: as an outcome of sinister deception. Without exception, all parties told some story of deception to explain the violent attacks of the Kurdish semi-nomadic crowds on the Armenian neighborhoods of the city of Harput. The article analyzes these cases of disguise, deluding, and inculcation to reveal how contemporary observers theorized crowd behavior in general and the atrocities they witnessed in particular. They did not perceive violence as an index of social distance or deep societal divisions. On the contrary, they described a world in which Armenians and Muslims lived a shared life, and where one attacked the other only when deceived. Methodologically, the article lifts barriers between intellectual history and social history on behalf of an historical ethnography of people's theories about their own society.

Hazardous chemical, biological and radiological (CBR) materials are catching attention of unscrupulous actors for creating terror and havoc. Threat perception for use of such materials by terrorists and non-state actors for malicious purposes, is not imaginative but real and imminent in today’s context. World has witnessed a number of such incidences in the recent years, e.g., Mustard gas attack against Kurdish forces in Iraq; ricin laced letters sent to US President and others senators; use of Nerve gas agents in Syria; capturing of Uranium from University of al- Mousal, Iraq by IS, etc. National assets like critical buildings where main legislative, historical building, Hospitals are some of the likely targets for CBR attacks attract quick coverage by media. Authorities related with managing and safeguarding mechanisms of the facilities to prevent such events happening also to enhance their capabilities as well as effective response. Essential CBR security should include measures to rapidly detect and effectively deter the CBR incidences their deleterious consequences. In this review, protection of the critical facilities from CBR attacks and capacity in terms of infrastructure, specialised training and mutual aid have been discussed.

It is my impression that Kurdish people often think of the lives, mores and life-worlds in Europe and the Middle East in terms of a dichotomy, or even as complete opposites. In my letter, I would like to draw readers’ attention to historical parallels, links and commonalities between medieval Kurdish worlds and those in medieval and early Modern Central Europe, especially in the case of Hungary.

In his editorial for last year’s May issue of Kurdish Studies, founding editor Prof. Ibrahim Sirkeci noted how navigating the “highly contested and politically charged field” of Kurdish studies required impartiality and a commitment to academic integrity on the part of the journal. Yet our professed impartiality does not mean that we stand aloof from social and political developments, nor that our editorial work is not guided by a number of moral, political and academic principles. As the leading scholarly journal in the field of Kurdish studies, we are aware of the role that the journal plays in creating structures of visibility, shaping knowledge production and, not least, influencing careers. We therefore believe that the recent discussion on male violence and sexual harassment in Kurdish studies, which was initiated by the publication of an anonymous letter via the Kurdish Studies Network, is of direct significance to the journal. It has initiated a discussion that was, in many ways, long overdue, both for the field as a whole and for our journal.

Deaf people all around the world face difficulty to communicate with the others. Hence, they use their own language to communicate with each other. On the other hand, it is difficult for deaf people to get used to technological services such as websites, television, mobile applications, and so on. This project aims to design a prototype system for deaf people to help them to communicate with other people and computers without relying on human interpreters. The proposed system is for letter-based Kurdish Sign Language (KuSL) which has not been introduced before. The system would be a real-time system that takes actions immediately after detecting hand gestures. Three algorithms for detecting KuSL have been implemented and tested, two of them are well-known methods that have been implemented and tested by other researchers, and the third one has been introduced in this paper for the 1st time. The new algorithm is named Gridbased gesture descriptor. It turned out to be the best method for the recognition of Kurdish hand signs. Furthermore, the result of the algorithm was 67% accuracy of detecting hand gestures. Finally, the other well-known algorithms are named scale invariant feature transform and speeded-up robust features, and they responded with 42% of accuracy.

Abstract
 The current study investigates the types and sources of spelling errors of Kurdish EFL learners. To this end, 82 argumentative articles written by university-level students were analyzed to identify the spelling errors. The process of classification and identification of the error type in the research was based on Cook’s (1997) familiar categories of errors. The results obtained showed that the type of errors were omission, insertion, substitution, transposition, space accuracy and capitalization. Those errors were originated from various sources among which instructional, overgeneralization and pure were prominent. It was also concluded that letter/sound correspondence creates problem for the learners. Interpretation of the results implies that pedagogical decision and further research is required in the learning context of Kurdish EFL learners. 
 
 

There are many manuscripts in the science of the Arabic language, which were writing by Kurdish scholars through the ages, and they were located in the House of local and international manuscripts, waiting for expert achievers to revive the manuscripts by achievement, and publication as wanted by the authors.We have chosen a grammatical manuscript from among those manuscripts,called the (Risalat Al-Zarf):its about ( The Adverb) by the Kurdish scholar: (Sayid Hasan al-chourri, who died in 1322 AH), and we have seen that it deserves achievement, in order to serve this heritage and its author because they represent the history of the Kurdish scientific, intellectual, and civilization.That the Kurdish scholars had a prominent role in the grammatical lesson along the history of the Arabic language.This grammatical letter dealt with the subject of ( The Adverb) in Arabic grammar, in short and concise manner, the most important collection of ( The Adverb), which is not found in this wonderful form, in solid and clear terms in presenting its articles, examples and explanations. The research plan is as follows: Introduction, Preface, Three parts, and Conclusion. Preface: In order to provide an overview of the issue of (The Adverb) in Arabic grammar, The first part: The biography of (Al-Chourriy) and its scientific literature.The second part: Achievement of the manuscript: description of copies, and our work in the achievement, and describe the topics of the (The Adverb).And the third part: The text achieved, and finally the conclusion of the most important results, and then sources and references.

This research is an attempt to present and discuss the subject of the journalistic discourse in the Kurdish press and educating the public on national issues, which are determined by the political and economic framework of the country through the elements of national sovereignty, international relations and economic policy. Citizen, the land and the country together so the researcher considered stop to search the facts related to the process of communication and those messages addressed to the general public through the press institutions lead us to reach the results in a scientific description and accurate analysis of the subject by which the researcher means As long as one of the scientific methods used in communication research based on the method of content analysis and questionnaire in the form of fieldwork in order to obtain the desired results. One of the most important results obtained by the researcher is the need for a unified press letter applied in all media institutions in order to preserve the safety of citizens and the security of the country, for it is observed that the Kurdish media do not adopt a unified view concerning national issues, in this case, the news on the Western Kurdistan. This approach to national issues should be eliminated and the Kurdish media should adopt a uniform media discourse in addressing such issues in order to crate a sense of national settlement and security.

ABSTRACTWe might flatter ourselves that the idea of a spin doctor is rather a modern one, but I wonder. Obviously enough, powerful rulers have always had their coterie of close advisers. But in the medieval Muslim world there is one outstanding example of something rather more than this: the team of three counsellors that Saladin assembled who watched over his interests and, crucially, his reputation, with unflagging devotion for decades. Two of them were, by any standard, intellectual stars who could have turned their multifarious talents in many directions but who chose rather to dedicate them to a man whom they not only admired but also loved. One of them, the poet ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, was a Persian with a truly awesome command of Arabic, a gift which he delighted to exhibit in and out of season. His pyrotechnic performances, solid with metaphor, saturated with puns, wordplay, alliteration, assonance and verbal acrobatics, are such a nightmare to understand that generations of Western Orientalists – and indeed Arab scholars too, for that matter – have recoiled from the task of editing certain of his works. Sometimes in his writings manner eclipses matter, but he is also capable of reaching heights of solemn eloquence, as in his paean of triumph at the recapture of Jerusalem, or his threnody on the death of Saladin. The other, the Qadi al-Fadil – his title means ‘The Excellent Judge’ – though only a somewhat pedestrian poet, was an acknowledged master of the epistolary prose that was de rigueur in Islamic chanceries, and for centuries his letters were regarded as models of their genre. His appearance, hunchbacked and skeletal, made him the butt of the court's satirical poets, but his political skills were beyond reproach, and indeed in his master's absence he governed Egypt for a time. It has been said that biography adds an extra terror to death, but in that respect Saladin need not have worried. For Ibn Shaddad, the third member of this distinguished triumvirate, who joined the team after the fall of Jerusalem but thereafter never left Saladin's side and therefore saw him in good times and bad, was a plain man with a plain style. But he rose to the occasion and crafted a biography of his hero Saladin that lets the facts speak for themselves. He has no time for stale panegyric; instead, his admiration for Saladin shines through his account at every turn, and it is he who laid the foundations for his master's posthumous celebrity. The lecture will explore the impact of these three men on the Saladin legend, which transformed a minor Kurdish warlord into an emblem of chivalry, piety and military glory which captured the hearts and the imaginations of Muslims for centuries to come – and still does.

In this paper, we introduce a method to identify the text printed in Arabic, since the recognition of the printed text is very important in the applications of information technology, the Arabic language is among a group of languages with related characters such as the language of Urdu , Kurdish language , Persian language also the old Turkish language " Ottoman ", it is difficult to identify the related letter because it is in several cases, such as the beginning of the word has a shape and center of the word has a shape and the last word also has a form, either texts in languages where the characters are not connected, then the image of the letter one in any location in the word has been Adoption of programs ready for him A long time. In this paper we present an off-line system to recognize printed Arabic text by using Hidden Markov Model with the aid of algorithm that segment the text line into sections and then into characters.

This study aims to reveal the sound and letter changes of Semsur(Adıyaman) mouth. In this way, Semsur is trying to reveal the features of his mouth. Because Adıyaman geographically remains in Northern Kurdistan. This floating Kurdish (Kurmanji) speaks away from centers. Our work aims to identify the voices of Semsur and to reveal falling and changing voices. In this direction, some audio recordings were taken from Semsur. Later, the samples were identified for use in the study from these sound recordings. The samples obtained were classified in the alphabetical order as loud and silent. In this classification, the sounds falling, changing or added were given by examples respectively. Apart from this, some findings related to conjunctions and prepositions were discussed. We also talked about changes in some gender-based appendices. As a result of which Semsur's mouth was exposed to sound changes and differences. we are pleased to express our thanks to İslim Doğan, who has made great efforts in obtaining sound recordings in this study and at the same time our students.

Missionary reports are the earliest modern records to explicitly mention the Kizilbash, and the “Kizilbash Kurds” in particular. Therefore, they have been utilised relatively extensively by researchers in the field, sometimes at levels disproportionate to their reliability and usefulness. This article develops my previous work on the perils of the missionary reports’ utilization without sufficient critical scrutiny of their inherent biases and limitations, and highlights, on the basis of an original missionary letter, the editorial process that they were likely subjected to before publication. It argues that the real significance of these sources lies not in their broad and biased speculations concerning distant (Kurdish) Kizilbash origins, but in the casual observations and incidental details they unwittingly supply. Abstract in Kurmanji Hizrên li ser raporên mîsyonerî yên sedsala 19an wek çavkanî ji bo dîroka Qizilbaşan (ên kurd) Raporên mîsyonerî qeydên modern ên ewil in ku bi eşkereyî behsa Qizilbaş an jî “kurdên Qizilbaş” bi taybetî dikin. Lewra, ew ji teref lêkolînerên li sehayê nisbeten bi berfirehî hatine bikaranîn, carna jî di asteke ne li gor bikêrhatî û ewlebûna wan de. Ev gotar li ser xebatên min ên berê ava bûye ku di wan de behsa talûkeya sûdwergirtina ji raporên mîsyoneran bêyî lêkolîneke rexneyî ya li hember pêşdarazî, sînorkirin û balkişandinên wan ên esasî tê kirin; û gotar bal dikşîne ser bingeha nameyeke mîsyonerî ya orîjînal, pêvajoya edîtorî ya muhtemel a berî weşandina ku ev name tê re derbas dibin. Gotar, nîqaş dike ku girîngiya rastîn ya van çavkaniyan ne di pêşqebûlên wan ên berfireh û alîgir yên di derbarê kokên (kurdên) Qizilbaş de ye lê di çavdêriyên wan ên rojane û teferuatên tesadufî de ye ku wan bêyî zanebûn gihandine. Abstract in Sorani Raman le raportî mizgênîderekanî sedey 19 wek serçaweyek bo mêjuy (Kurdî) ‏Qzilbaş Raportî mizgênîderekan kontirîn tomarî serdemin ke be raşkawî nawî qzilbaşekanî hênabêt û ‏betaybetîş "qzilbaşe kurdekan". Leberewe, be rêjeyekî frawan û hendêkcar ta astî ‏neguncan legell ‏bawerrpêkrawî û sûdmendî ew serçawane, lelayen twêjeranî ew bware ‏sûdyan lêwergîrawe. Em wtare leser bnemay ‏karêkî pêşûtrim bunyadinrawe ke derbarey ‏metrisîy bekarbirdnî raportî mizgênîderekane bê ewey wku ‏pêwîst hellsengandinêkî ‏rexnegrane bikrêt bo layengîrîy zigmakîyane û snurdarêtî ew mizgênîderane, we leser bnemay ‏nameyekî esllî mizgênîderêk, tîşk dexate ser prosey ‏paknuskirdin ke pêdeçêt ‏mizgênîderekan pêş bllawkirdnewe rûberrûy bûbnewe . Miştumrrî ewe ‏dekat ke bayexî ‏rasteqîney em serçawane le xemllandinî giştî û layengîrîyaneyan lemerr rîşey dûrî ‏qzillbaşî (kurdî)ewe nayet, bellku lew serince labela û zanîyarye ‏xelletênerane daye ke ewan ‏beanqest dawyane.‏ Abstract in Zazaki Sey çimeyanê tarîxê (kurdanê) qizilbaşan, raporanê mîsyoneranê seserra 19. ser o tefekurî Qeydê modernê tewr verênî yê ke bi hewayo eşkera qalê qizilbaşan û bitaybetî qalê kurdanê qizilbaşan kenê, raporê mîsyoneran ê. Coka nê raporî hetê cigêrayoxanê nê warî ra hetê nîsbetî ra hende ameyî xebitnayene ke ge-gane goreyê bawerbarî û feydeyê înan sînorê qebulî ra zî vîyartêne. Na meqale xebata min a verên a ke mi derheqê tehlukeyanê xebitnayîşê raporanê mîsyoneran yê bê rexnegirîya tehqîqê cidî yê terefgirî û sînordarîya înan de kerdbî, aye ser o virazîyaya. Na meqale pê bingeyê mektubêka mîsyonerêk a orîjînale bale ancena prosesê înan ê edîtoryalî ser ke bi îhtîmalêk weşanîyayîş ra ver pêro nê prosesî ro vîyartêne ra. Na xebate nê fikrî dana munaqeşeyî ro ke girîngîya nê çimeyan a raştikêne, pêardişanê înan ê hîra û terefgîran derheqê ristimê (kurdanê) qizilbaşan ê dûrî de nîya, la observasyonanê eleladeyan û teferuatan ê ke mîsyoneran bi tesadufî dayî, înan de ya.

В статье на основе исследований российских ученых, архивных документов, воспоминаний рассматривается слабо изученная в отечественной историографии проблема участия представителей этнических меньшинств в битвах за Кавказ и Крым в ходе Великой Отечественной войны. В качестве примера автором избраны этнические общности курдов и корейцев. Использованы историко-генетический, историко-биографический и системно-исторический методы. Изучены меры советского командования по формированию национальных воинских подразделений; реконструированы биографии героев войны – корейцев и курдов, участвовавших в освобождении Юга России и получивших боевые награды; прослежена их послевоенная судьба; рассмотрены репрессивные действия советского правительства по отношению к военнослужащим некоторых национальностей. Автор заключает, что представители разных народов СССР, столкнувшись с врагом, проявили стремление к единству и добровольное желание выступить на защиту государства, которое они избрали своей Родиной. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the biographies of participants in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), who belonged to ethnic minorities and fought for the liberation of the Caucasus and Crimea from Nazi invaders. As an example, the author selected ethnic communities of Kurds and Koreans. The study was conducted on the basis of research by Russian scholars, archival documents, and memoirs of direct participants in the events. The historical-genetic, historical-biographical and system-historical methods were used. The measures of the Soviet command for the formation of national military units were studied, the biographies of war heroes, Koreans and Kurds who participated in the liberation of the South of Russia and received military awards (including the title Hero of the Soviet Union) were reconstructed. The author describes in detail the military clashes during which these fighters showed military prowess, presents their photographs, and traces their further military path, post-war fate and forms of their memory perpetuation. Quotations from the war veterans’ front-line letters and their relatives’ memoirs are given. The repressive actions of the Soviet government towards the military personnel of certain nationalities, who after the demobilization received the status of “special settlers” and lost their military tickets and award sheets, are also considered. The author emphasizes that the fight against the enemy was a test of strength for the unity of the peoples living in the Caucasus and Crimea. Examples of civic solidarity in the fight against the enemy shown by ethnic minorities in the early days of the war (mass enrollment in volunteers, holding civil rallies) are given. It is noted that representatives of local ethnic communities became the basis of 12 military units that were at the forefront of the defenders of the Caucasus. The paradoxical nature of the situation in which USSR citizens were repressed for various (often far-fetched) reasons is stated; however, during the war they still heroically fought against Nazism with arms in their hands. The author connects the repressions against members of the ethnic minorities with the ethnosocial policy pursued by the Soviet state, as well as the spread of desertion and draft evasion in the North Caucasus and Crimea. It is concluded that representatives of ethnic minorities living in the USSR, faced with the enemy, showed a desire for unity and a voluntary desire to defend the state, which they chose as their homeland.


 
 
 All critics declare not only their judgment of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art. (Pierre Bourdieu 36).
 
 
 As it becomes blindingly obvious that ‘cultural production’, including the cinema, now underpins an economy every bit as brutal in its nascent state as the Industrial Revolution was for its victims 200 years ago, both critique and cinephilia seem faded and useless to me. (Meaghan Morris 700).
 
 
 The music’s loud, the lights are low. I’m at a party and somebody’s shouting at me. “How many films do you see every week?” “Do you really get in for free?” “So what should I see next Saturday night?” These are the questions that shape the small talk of my life. After seven years of reviewing movies you’d think I’d have ready answers and sparkling rehearsed tip-offs to scatter at the slightest quiver of interest. And yet I feel anxious when I’m asked to predict some stranger’s enjoyment – their 15-odd bucks worth of dark velvet pleasure. Who am I to say what they’ll enjoy? Who am I to judge what’s worthwhile? 
 
 As editor of the film pages of The Big Issue magazine (Australian edition), I make such value judgments every day, sifting through hundreds of press releases, invitations and interview offers. I choose just three films and three DVDs to be reviewed each fortnight, and one film to form the subject of a feature article or interview. The film pages are a very small part of an independent magazine that exists to provide an income for the homeless and long-term unemployed people who sell it on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. And no, homeless people don’t go to the movies very often but our relatively educated and affluent city-dwelling readers do. 
 
 The letters page of the magazine suggests that readers’ favourite pages are the Vendor Portraits – the extraordinary and sobering photographs and life stories of the people who are out there on the streets selling the magazine. Yet the editorial policy is to maintain a certain lightness of touch amidst the serious business. Thus, the entertainment pages (music, books, film, TV and humour) have no specific social justice agenda. But if there’s a new Australian film out there that deals with the topic of homelessness, it seems imperative to at least consider the story.
 
 Rather than offering in-depth analysis of particular films and the ways I go about judging them, the following diary excerpts instead offer a sketch of the practical process of editorial decision-making. Why review this film and not that one? Why interview this actor or that film director? And how do these choices fit within the broad goals of a social justice publication? Created randomly, from a quick scan of the last twelve months, the diary is a scribbled attempt to justify, or in Bourdieu’s terms, “legitimate” the critical role I play, and to try and explain how that role can never be fully defined by an aesthetic that is divorced from social and political realities. 
 
 August 2004
 
 My editor calls me and asks if I’ve seen Tom White, the new low-budget Australian film by Alkinos Tsilimidos. I have, and I hated it. Starring Colin Friels, the film follows the journey of a middle-aged middle-class man who walks out of his life and onto the streets. It’s a grimy, frustrating film, supported by only the barest bones of narrative. I was bored and infuriated by the central character, and I know it’s the kind of under-developed story that’s keeping Australian audiences away from our own films. And yet … it’s a local film that actually dares to tackle issues of homelessness and mental illness, and it’s a story that presents a truth about homelessness that’s borne out by many of our vendors: that any one of us could, except by the grace of God or luck, find ourselves sleeping rough.
 
 My editor wants me to interview Colin Friels, who will appear on the cover of the magazine. I don’t want to touch the film, and I prefer interviewing people whose work genuinely interests and excites me. But there are other factors to be considered. The film’s exhibitor, Palace Films, is offering to hold charity screenings for our benefit, and they are regular advertising supporters of The Big Issue. My editor, a passionate and informed film lover himself, understands the quandary. We are in no way beholden to Palace, he assures me, and we can tread the fine line with this film, using it to highlight the important issues at hand, without necessarily recommending the film to audiences. It’s tricky and uncomfortable; a simple example of the way in which political and aesthetic values do not always dance so gracefully together. Nevertheless, I find a way to write the story without dishonesty.
 
 September 2004
 
 There’s no denying the pleasure of writing (or reading) a scathing film review that leaves you in stitches of laughter over the dismembered corpse of a bad movie. But when space is limited, I’d rather choose the best three films every fortnight for review and recommendation. In an ideal world I’d attend every preview and take my pick. They’d be an excitingly diverse mix. Say, one provocative documentary (maybe Mike Moore or Errol Morris), one big-budget event movie (from the likes of Scorsese or Tarantino), and one local or art-house gem. In the real world, it’s a scramble for deadlines. Time is short and some of the best films only screen in one or two states, making it impossible for us to cover them for our national audience. Nevertheless, we do our best to keep the mix as interesting and timely as possible. For our second edition this month I review the brilliant documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky), while I send other reviewers to rate Spielberg’s The Terminal (only one and a half stars out of five), and Cate Shortland’s captivating debut Australian feature Somersault (four stars).
 
 For the DVD review page we look at a boxed set of The Adventures of Tintin, together with the strange sombre drama House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman), and the gripping documentary One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald) about the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As editor, I try to match up films with the writers who’ll best appreciate them. With a 200-word limit we know that we’re humble ‘reviewers’ rather than lofty ‘critics’, and that we can only offer the briefest subjective response to a work. Yet the goal remains to be entertaining and fair, and to try and evaluate films on their own terms. Is this particular movie an original and effective example of the schlocky teen horror thriller? If so, let’s give it the thumbs up. Is this ‘worthy’ anti-globalisation documentary just a boring preachy sermon with bad hand-held camera work? Then we say so.
 
 For our film feature article this edition, I write up an interview with Italian director Luigi Falorni, whose simple little film The Weeping Camel has been reducing audiences to tears. It’s a strange quiet film, a ‘narrative documentary’ set in the Gobi desert, about a mother camel that refuses to give milk to her newborn baby. There’s nothing political or radical about it. It’s just beautiful and interesting and odd. And that’s enough to make it worthy of attention. 
 
 November 2004
 
 When we choose to do a ‘celebrity’ cover, we find pretty people with serious minds and interesting causes. This month two gorgeous film stars, Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal find their way onto our covers. Portman’s promoting the quirky coming of age film, Garden State (Zach Braff), but the story we run focuses mainly on her status as ambassador for the Foundation of International Community Assistance (FINCA), which offers loans to deprived women to help them start their own businesses. Gabriel Garcia Bernal, the Mexican star of Walter Salle’s The Motorcycle Diaries appears on our cover and talks about his role as the young Che Guevara, the ultimate idealist and symbol of rebellion. We hope this appeals to those radicals who are prepared to stop in the street, speak to a homeless person, and shell out four dollars for an independent magazine – and also to all those shallow people who want to see more pictures of the hot-eyed Latin lad. 
 
 April 2005
 
 Three Dollars is Robert Connelly’s adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s best-selling novel about economic rationalism and its effect on an average Australian family. I loved the book, and the film isn’t bad either, despite some unevenness in the script and performances. I interview Frances O’Connor, who plays opposite David Wenham as his depressed underemployed wife. O’Connor makes a beautiful cover-girl, and talks about the seemingly universal experience of depression. We run the interview alongside one with Connelly, who knows just how to pitch his film to an audience interested in homelessness. He gives great quotes about John Howard’s heartless Australia, and the way we’ve become an economy rather than a society. It’s almost too easy.
 
 In the reviews section of the magazine we pan two other Australian films, Paul Cox’s Human Touch, and the Jimeoin comedy-vehicle The Extra. I’d rather ignore bad Australian films and focus on good films from elsewhere, or big-budget stinkers that need to be brought down a peg. But I’d lined up reviews for these local ones, expecting them to be good, and so we run with the negativity. Some films are practically critic-proof, but small niche films, like most Australian titles, aren’t among these Teflon giants. As Joel Pearlman, Managing Director of Roadshow Films has said, “There are certain types of films that are somewhat critic-proof. They’ve either got a built-in audience, are part of a successful franchise, like The Matrix or Bond films, or have a popular star. It’s films without the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and the big names where critics are far more influential” ( Pearlman in Bolles 19). Sometimes I’m glad that I’m just a small fish in the film critic pond, and that my bad reviews can’t really destroy someone’s livelihood. It’s well known that a caning from reviewers like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (ABC, At the Movies), or the Melbourne Age’s Jim Schembri can practically destroy the prospects of a small local film, and I’m not sure I have the bravery or conviction of the value of my own tastes to bear such responsibility. Admittedly, that’s just gutless tender-heartedness for, as reviewers, our responsibility is to the audience not to the filmmaker. But when you’ve met with cash-strapped filmmakers, and heard their stories and their struggles, it’s sometimes hard to put personal compassion aside and see the film as the punter will. But you must. 
 
 August 2005
 
 It’s a busy time with the Melbourne International Film Festival just finishing up. Hordes of film directors accompany their films to the festival, promoting them here ahead of a later national release schedule, and making themselves available for rare face-to face interviews. This year I find a bunch of goodies that seem like they were tailor-made for our readership. There are winning local films like Sarah Watt’s life-affirming debut Look Both Ways; and Rowan Woods’ gritty addiction-drama Little Fish. There’s my personal favourite, Bahman Ghobadi’s stunning and devastating Kurdish/Iranian feature Turtles Can Fly; and Avi Lewis’s inspiring documentary The Take, about Argentine factory workers who unite to revive their bankrupt workplaces.
 
 It’s when I see films like this, and get to talk to the people who bring them into existence, that I realize how much I value writing about films for a publication that doesn’t exist just to make a profit or fill space between advertisements. As the great American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has eloquently argued, most of the worldwide media coverage concerning film is merely a variation on the ‘corporate stories’ that film studios feed us as part of their advertising. To be able to provide some small resistance to that juggernaut is a wonderful privilege.
 
 I love to be lost in the dark, studying films frame by frame, and with reference only to some magical internal universe of ‘cinema’ and its endless references to itself. But as the real world outside falls apart, such airless cinephilia feels just plain wrong. As a writer whose subject is films, what I’m compelled to do is to come out of the cinema and try to use my words to convey the best of what I’ve seen to my friends and readers, pointing them towards small treasures they may have overlooked amidst the hype. So maybe I’m not a ‘pure’ critic, and maybe there’s no shame in that. The films I’ll gravitate towards share an almost indefinable quality – to use Jauss’s phrase, they reconstruct and expand my “horizon of expectation” (28). Sometimes these films are overtly committed to a cause, but often they’re just beautiful and strange and fresh. Always they expand me, open me, make me feel that there’s more to the world than expected, and make me want more too – more information, more freedom, more compassion, more equality, more beauty. And, after all these years in the dark, I still want more films like that.
 
 Endnotes
 
 As of August 2005, the role of DVD editor of The Big Issue has been filled by Anthony Morris.
 
 According the latest Morgan Poll, readers of The Big Issue are likely to be young (18-39), urban, educated, and affluent professionals. Current readership is estimated at 144,000 fortnightly and growing.
 
 References
 
 Bolles, Scott. “The Critics.” Sunday Life. The Age 10 Jul. 2005: 19. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Morris, Meaghan. “On Going to Bed Early: Once Upon a Time in America.” Meanjin 4 (1998): 700. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Junket Bonds.” Chicago Reader Movie Review (2000). 2 Sept. 2005 http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/1000/00117.html>. The Big Issue Australia. http://www.bigissue.org.au/> 10 Oct. 2005.
 
 
 
 
 Citation reference for this article
 
 MLA Style
 Siemienowicz, Rochelle. "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>. APA Style
 Siemienowicz, R. (Oct. 2005) "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>.