Four hundred years ago, during the Safavid and Ottoman era, forty thousand Kurds were resettled by the King of Persia from Anatolia to the northeastern frontiers of the Persian Empire. Today, over two million Kurds live in Khorasan with their distinct language and cultural identity, yet even now, as so often through their history, they still face the forces of erasure. In Forgotten Chords, Soran Mardookhi shows how folk music is intertwined with the fabric of the Khorasani Kurds’ culture and identity. The film introduces us to Kalimulla Tawahodi, a gardener turned musicologist and academic, who might be described as the Alan Lomax of Kurdish folk; just as Lomax made hundreds of field recordings of American blues and folk during his travels through the American South in the 1940s and 50s, preserving songs that might otherwise have been lost, so too Tawahodi has played an invaluable role in sustaining the oral traditions of Kurdish troubadours, ashiks and bakshis.
