Why did Turkey censor the song in Nick Xhelilaj's film?

Turkish film “Zer”, with leading Albanian actor Nick Xhelilaj, continues to reap success in the international arena despite the fact that during the performance in Turkish cinemas several of its sequences have been censored by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Turkish media reports that the film “Zer” has won the “Grand Prix du Publique” award at the 23rd International Nancy Festival in France.

“Zer” is a film by director Kazim Oz. The film story begins in New York, where Jan (Nick Xhelilaj), the son of several Turkish immigrants, studied music. His grandmother arrives in town for a cancer surgery from which he hears a traditional song.

The young one is involved in passion to find out what's behind it. This brings Jan from the United States to Dersim, where he also reveals some secrets of his family.

At the funeral of his grandmother, Jan learns from his aunt that in fact his grandmother had been Kurdish and that in the Dersim massacre he had lost his family to be adopted later by a Turkish family.

The song was the only legacy left to her from her Kurdish identity. The pain is the subject of thousands of families who have experienced similar events back then.
The Dering massacre is known as the clash of several Kurdish tribes with the Turkish Army in 1937-1938, which ended in the death of about 13,000 Kurds and over 100 Turkish soldiers, as well as the shift of more than 12,000 residents.

Even the name of the leading actor Jan in Kurdish means pain.

The film, though financially supported by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, has also fallen prey to censorship by this minister himself.
In protest of the culture ministry, director Kazim Oz decided that censorshiped parts of the film would not expect them from the film as it appeared in the cinema, but that he would decide that “this sequence was censored by the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry”.

He even went further, accusing the government of acting democraticly when he was interested, and when he didn't care, he behaved like a despot. /tvclean. al