Fırat Yücel

Turkish film industry has been experiencing a breakthrough in the last ten years. According to 2015 figures, there is a bold uptrend in terms of viewers and film production. Yet without any regulations at work, this growth only made injustices in distribution bigger. While a single cinema chain controls more then 50% of the market, it also started to control distribution and production. In this monopolized environment, there seems to be no country for independent production. With the guidance of producers, distributors, and economists, the film traces the distortion created by the bad economy that has become an obstacle for freedom of choice.

Kawa Nemir is like a walking dictionary of the Kurdish language. He flees Turkey and takes refuge at Anne Frank's former house in Amsterdam. Will he be able to finish the translation of Ulysses and publish it?

Heads and Tails chronicles the curious hair trade between Turkey and Israel. Two Turkish-Israeli women, Coya and Sima, get the tails of hair from male hair traders in Turkey and sell them to wig makers in Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan and Bnei Brak. Orthodox Jewish women cover their heads with the wigs made of the hair that once belonged to women in Anatolia. In this journey, the hair is turned into a commodity, a means of living and source of beauty, becomes kosher, while the one who carefully grows the hair becomes rather invisible.

Desktop images, letters, text messages, interviews and CCTV footage, this aesthetically eclectic, politically daring collection of films by Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema stresses the need for criticality in times of censorship and repression.

Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater chronicles one of the most prominent struggles that took place in the heart of Istanbul between 2010-2013 and paved the way to the Gezi Resistance.

Cemile and Sezgin have been keeping on writing their love story on walls and streets of Izmir for five years. Dominik Street residents have a myriad of theories on who these mysterious people are. This film is about urban surfaces and urban legends.

Sleeping disorders are omnipresent in this day and age. In this desktop diary, a resident of Amsterdam cannot sleep, absorbed by the genocides and atrocities being broadcast in real time.

March 8, 2020: A Memoir is a multi-voiced desktop essay attempting to find the blind spots of ’Touristic Cameras’ looking at Taksim Square during the Feminist Night March. A child playing with a red balloon, youngsters dancing on the street, people taking photos... Time traveling via screen recordings, this is a memoir of the last demonstration in Istanbul before the pandemic.

Doubts (Tereddütler) is a ‘desktop thriller’ reflecting the editing process of a documentary on Gezi Resistance.