Following the Peacock - A Documentary by Eszter Spät

About

Eszter Spät is a research fellow at Central European University, doing research on the religious and social structure of the Yezidis, a Kurdish religious minority. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies in 2009. Her post-doctoral research, “Processes of Integration, Identity Construction and the Role of Religion: The Case of the Iraqi Yezidis,” studies the role of the Yezidi religion in the Kurdish national movement, as well as the impact of modernity and Kurdish nationalism on the construction of Yezidi identity and the transformation of Yezidi oral tradition and religious institutions in Northern Iraq. She is the author of Late Antique Motifs in Yezidi Oral Tradition. She worked as an English teacher and journalist in Iraqi Kurdistan and observed the Yezidi community in 2002-2003, the result of her fieldwork is two books. The footage for this film was shot during two field trips in 2011 and 2012 supported by the Hungarian OTKA and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. This anthropological documentary introduces the Yezidis, a little-known minority of Northern Iraq, and follows the tour of their most sacred object, the Standard of the Peacock through the settlements of Sinjar Mountain, where the traditional way of life and customs are undergoing a rapid change, due to the political, economic and social shifts of the last decades.

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