Fatma Belkıs

At this endless night when the sun does not come up, and the darkness prevailed, Woman and Man search for a solution in leaving their normal life, property, and civilization as we know it, and going to nature. They depart and leave their friends after a dinner which has less excitement than before to test their hope about social revival.

On one side of the city divided in two by the Bosphorus, a woman insistently tries to watch the other side. Emre Birişmen was born in Istanbul in 1986. He completed his undergraduate and graduate education at Sabancı University's Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design program. He is a visual artist working with photography and video.

We Are Not Familiar With a Generation That Has No Understanding of Sadness constructs a narrative around the artists’ fundamental research on the mimeograph. By using significant political texts and transcripts from history as a reference point, against this historical background, they reflect upon the contemporary situation in Türkiye. In affinity with previous generations, who are saddened by the perished dreams and ideals, they search for agency under despotism—attempting to negotiate their elusive position between two extremes of utopian escapism and revolutionary struggle as recourse to estrangement.

The Connected

Writer/director Fatma Belkıs reclaims the filmic artifacts of Turkish discrimination against Kurds in the singular micro short, Keje. Belkis picks up cuttingroom-floor remains from the 1968 film, Seyyit Han, a film that managed distribution approval by the Turkish Committee on Film Censorship only after producer, Abdurrahman Keskiner, excised every single utterance of the leading female character’s name, “Keje”—because it was a Kurdish name. This rejection of a Kurdish name was only one tyrannical enforcement of an official state policy exacting a comprehensive denial of Kurds as an ethnic population. Here then, with redemptive operatic ease, Belkis resurrects and coalesces every single utterance of the name in a kind of inevitable rapid-fire response and features the “Keje” quickfire between Seyyit Han’s original opening sequence and the film’s final “The End”. Keje is not just genre-defiant but utterly defiant. And restorative.