Lisa

Çalan

I was born on January 12, 1988, in Diyarbakır, as one of eleven children in a Kurdish and politically active family. I experienced a difficult childhood due to ongoing state oppression against Kurds.
Because Kurds were denied the right to education in their mother tongue, I left school after finishing high school, refusing to receive education in Turkish.
Since childhood, I had dreamed of becoming a filmmaker and creating cinema in my own language. With this purpose, I studied cinema at the Aram Tigran City Conservatory, which was founded by the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality and carried out its cultural work in the Kurdish language.
During my education, I began participating in film projects. In 2013, I directed my first short film, Zimanê Çîya, within the resisting cinema movement.
While striving to make rights-based cinema, I lost both of my legs in the ISIS bomb attack carried out on June 5, 2015, during the Peoples’ Democratic Party’s election rally in Diyarbakır. After a long treatment process, I returned to taking part in projects and festivals.
I currently work in cinema and festival studies at the Middle East Cinema Academy. For four years, I served on the viewing committee of the Filmmor Women’s Film Festival. Together with the Rosa Women’s Association, I was involved in The Purple Meridians project (2020-2023), which brought together feminist filmmaker groups from three countries. Despite the intense effort required to seek justice and to tell my—or rather, our—story through my camera, I completed my VR film Siseban in 2021. I am the Director of the the 3rd Amed Kurdish Film Festival, and Coordinator of the 9th FilmAmed International Documentary Film Festival. I am currently collaborating with a Mexican director on a documentary about my biography.