Producers Bio’s
Yahya Al-Abdullah born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1985 now lives in Istanbul. Yahya Al-Abdullah is a
university instructor working for the Undergraduate English Program of Isik Universiry. Prior to
Istanbul, he lived in Georgia and worked as a volunteer teacher and teacher trainer. While in Syria, he
also worked as a stage actor and a stage director at the theater of Aleppo University, where he
graduated. He has experience working in the NGO sector as a volunteer trainer. In 2015 he joins the
Central European University, Budapest for his second Master's Degree in Public Administration.
Max Harwood is an ethnographic filmmaker and PhD candidate in Anthropology at Macquarie
University. He currently lives in Istanbul and Tel Aviv as he frantically works to complete his PhD
before his funding runs out.
Documentary Description
‘We Don't Stay in Camps’ is an ethnographic documentary profiling the recent arrival of innumerable
Syrian street beggars in Istanbul, Turkey. As of 2015, fallout from the ongoing civil war has displaced
upwards of two million Syrian refugees into Turkey alone. Though international organizations, in
concert with the Turkish government, have established refugee camps on the Syrian-Turkish border,
migration has pushed Syrians further west across all of Anatolia.
In the winter of early 2014, large numbers of families suddenly appeared begging on the streets of
central Istanbul, over a thousand kilometers from the Syrian border. In order to document the
developing situation, we set out to speak to the newly arrived refugees, initially to gather interviews to
raise awareness through ethnographic film. Conceived and shot over a few months on our days off, the
film was created without any funding or formal permission and with mostly borrowed equipment.
Over three months, we sat and spoke with dozens of men, women and children. Having lived in Aleppo
for most of his life, Yahya immediately recognized the identity of the majority of Istanbul’s beggars as
native Syrian Domari or Kurbat.
A distinct ethnicity and nomadic Kurdish/Turkic community, Syria's Domari (or Kurbaht) are amongst
the country's poorest people. Traditionally following the harvest season, the Domari travel in large
families, passing from village to village, playing music and providing entertainment at weddings in
exchange for food and supplies for the winter - a social and economic pattern that has existed for
centuries. In dense urban environments like Aleppo and Damascus, they are known to sell basic wares
and benefit from zakat (alms giving) around mosques and other holy places. Unfortunately, they
suffered from discrimination in terms of health care education and basic human rights in Syria for a
long period of time and they are falling into a worse trap on the streets of Istanbul, especially the kids.
The majority of the kids did not have any formal education back in Syria, and the few who did, did not
make through the elementary school. The documentary is trying to highlight the fact the kids are again
deprived from any kind of schooling. The only thing left for them is begging or selling water on the
streets when education can be a key solution for them to have a completely different path in life.
After being ‘told’ and promised to find well paid jobs, what awaited them, however, was forced street
begging in central Istanbul, and communal living in rundown slums that were described as ‘hotels’ run
at exorbitant rates by apparent human traffickers. We were shocked to realize that almost everyone we
spoke to hinted at, or specifically testified to being forced to beg in a city they had never imagined they
would ever visit.
After a summer of filming, what emerged was contrary to the simplistic narrative of Istanbul's new
arrivals. Not the product of a failing humanitarian response, Istanbul's Syrian beggars are the result of
an extremely vulnerable community disoriented by war, forced to flee from their homes and seemingly
exploited by an unseen minority for financial gain.
'We Don't Stay in Camps' attempts to show both the extreme complexity of the ongoing Syrian refugee
crisis and its demographics, whilst trying to humanise a largely faceless catastrophe of unimaginable
proportion.