Aylin Kuryel

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Welcome Lenin chronicles the story of the Lenin statue, most likely thrown away after the collapse of the Soviet Union, traveled for almost two years in the Black Sea to be eventually put “under protection” in a dusty storage room in a municipality building in a remote village in Turkey.

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In 2016, hundreds of academics signed a petition in Turkey, asking the state to put an end to violence inflicted upon Kurdish people. Academics for Peace have been criminalized and put on trial with the charge of terrorist propaganda. A Defense portrays one of the Academics for Peace while preparing for her upcoming appearance in court in 2019. A psychodrama is put on stage in a house, where the person is both the state, the judge, the academic and the cook. It’s a self-portrait on the violence and absurdity of the ways in which the state sneaks into the house of an academic, forcing her to adjust her words, body and gestures.

No description available.