Film Screening and Talk with the Directors curated by Senem Aytaç (TR), film critic and curator.
Films (OV with english subtitles):
Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater
Dir. Emek Bizim İstanbul Bizim Initiative(2016)
Atlas – Dir. Osman Baran Özdemir (2022)
Witness – Dir. H. Işık (2022)
Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater
Dir. Emek Bizim İstanbul Bizim Initiative
Turkey, 2016, 48 min.
Synopsis
Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater chronicles the struggle for Emek Theater -which is demolished against people’s consent and common good, and turned into a shopping mall- through the eyes of the activists and spectators. The film consists of the footage people who joined the struggle collected, and in this sense, aims to reflect the common imagination of the people who defended their right to the city. It carries the idea of a new publicness that gained visibility with the Gezi Resistance to the cinema screen through a political mobilization for cinema itself.
Experiences of Resistance: Atlas + Witness
Two videos with an “inside” perspective towards the ongoing Boğaziçi Resistance, which ignited in the early days of 2021, following the various university bodies’ refusal of university rector’s undemocratic promotion. While Osman Baran Özdemir looks back at his personal archive of the first nine months of the resistance in Atlas; In Witness, H. Işık creates space in the campus for five Boğaziçi activists’ overlooked feelings during the protests.
Atlas
12 minutes / 2022 / Turkish (with English subtitles)
Director / Camera /Editing Osman Baran Özdemir
Sound mix Alper Çağan
“Atlas focuses on remembering Boğaziçi University students’ movement, which started on 4 January 2021 and spread beyond campus, joining forces with other actions, through the archive that consists of videos I took during the first nine months of the resistance. As we record, to document the discourse of the protests and the abuse of rights that took place, our personal experience and daily life also becomes a part of these documents. On the other hand, when these recordings become public, what they display might not match with our memories or words. Can we fill in the gaps of the archive’s politically driven memory and our own recollections? Can the mechanical quality of an archive and the associations of human memory unite? Can one observe themselves through an archive they created?” – Osman Baran Özdemir
Osman Baran Özdemir finished their Physics BS and Film Studies Programme at Boğaziçi University. They are currently pursuing an MSc degree in Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University. Özdemir is working on photography, video, documentary, experimental and fiction films.
Witness
7 minutes / 2022 / Turkish (with English subtitles)
Director / Camera / Editing H. Işık
Sound Mix Alper Çağan
English subtitles Deniz İnal
“Witness came out during a period of waking up to different images of violence everyday while the act of recording and distributing these same images was tried to be illegalized. It is an attempt to create a horizontal gaze and bear witness through an emotional read of the resistance that spread into various parts of our lives. As we listen to the emotions of five Boğaziçi activists, which they held back to “avoid harming the resistance itself”, we accompany a calm yet anxious walk through the two campus sites; seemingly free of violence, yet have become spaces of violence for many people at Boğaziçi. Even though we only see glimpses of recorded physical violence, this video aims to rethink the continuity of violence in daily life and all its various forms, together with a space of affectivity.” – H. Işık
H. Işık finished their B.A at Boğaziçi University’s Sociology program. At the moment, they are pursuing an MA in visual arts and visual communication design, focusing on video art, documentary cinema and visual memory studies.
Senem Aytaç is a film critic and curator. She has been on the editorial board of the Turkish film magazine Altyazı since 2004 and was one the chief editors for more than ten years. She is a co-founder and the project manager of Altyazı Cinema Association, which was founded in 2019 which focuses on censorship and freedom of artistic expression, in order to strengthen a free film culture in Turkey. She is now based in Berlin as a MRI scholarship holder in collaboration with the Artist Residency Program ‘Hier & Jetzt: Connections’.
