Antakya
Mehmet Kuyumcu
Writer and Director, Missed Lives: The Dom People
This film sheds light on the Dom’s cultural heritage and living conditions in Antakya before and after the earthquakes through a rights-based lens. Filming began in 2022, shaped by interviews with the remaining masters of traditional Dom crafts such as tinning, jewelry-making, and dentistry. Months of footage was lost in the earthquakes, and the documentary in its initial vision could not be finished. Kuyumcu resumed filming, building upon the original footage, and documenting ongoing human rights violations in the wake of the disaster. The film highlights the importance of preserving cultural diversity, and calls on civil society and media actors to work in solidarity with this community to find just solutions.
Mehmet Kuyumcu is a member of the Dom community and was born in Antakya. He chose to pursue filmmaking in order to tell the stories of his community and to document the discrimination, social exclusion and ignored cultural heritage faced by the Dom and Roma communities living in Hatay. His long-term goals are to increase the visibility and preserve the memory of these communities through film, to produce works that document and archive the destruction of Dom and Roma cultural heritage, and to inspire the next generation of Dom youth to tell their own stories.
The Dom, an Indo-Aryan ethnic group which shares origins in India with the Roma, are traditionally known for an itinerant lifestyle, and live in communities across the Middle East. Despite centuries of settlement, they often remain socially marginalized and legally unrecognized, with their language and cultural practices transmitted primarily through oral tradition. Hatay is home to Türkiye’s largest Dom community, yet has largely been excluded from the discourses on multiculturalism that celebrate Antakya’s socio-cultural diversity. Deprived of fundamental rights such as education, healthcare, housing, and employment, the Dom are rendered invisible.