Hazal Bayar

A woman who has been watching her next door neighbor for some time develops an intense affection for her neighbor's cat. This love will eventually end in regret.

During the quarantine process, we watch the monogs performed by a woman alone at home. When these monogs are combined with her inner voice, she gets lost in both sounds and images. Audio and image segments that occur between only a few seconds long sentences.

An archival biography in three chapters, exploring the revolutionary potential of being a cinephile... A war pilot, a radical revolutionary, and a cinephile... This is the portrait of a man who left the army and built a successful career as businessman in Europe. Only a few people knew that he was also an undercover member of the resistance movement against Turkey’s military regime in early 1970s. Mekin Gönenç later dedicated most of his life to the movies. When he died after suffering a heart attack while swimming in 2011, he left behind thousands of VHS tapes and meticulously crafted home-made film journals. His death between the two blues he cherished most—the sea and the sky— now give some consolation to his wife. Through archives, we trace the journey of a 20th-century romantic. (DokuFest, Balkan Dox, 2025 )

Türkiye’s modernization adventure is an intermittent one that carries the pains of transition from empire to republic and of geographical liminality in every aspect of culture. At the center of this arduous modernist attitude in art is İlhan Usmanbaş, who was born in 1921 in the Ottoman Empire, whose atonal music of the 1950s influenced not only the field of music but also literature. As an essay film, Modernist: Usmanbaş both traces the composer's insistence on playing 20th century music in his compositions and visual notation and follows him in the private nursing home where he lived from the age of 100 to 103. While the film records Usmanbaş's curiosity in natural history and the intellectual structure he built between music, science and mathematics with the testimonies of the last years of his life, it also makes references to modernist art in formal terms as a meta attitude.

The 21st-Century Cinema Index, an extensive research project on 21st-century film by Hasan Cem Çal, a writer whose work focuses on the evolution of the moving image, has been adapted into a video essay by Hazal Bayar, an academic known for her experimental short films. Written originally for Manifold, one of Turkey’s leading online platforms, the work serves as a unique gallery of foundational images and concepts of the past twenty-five years of cinema.

Five middle-aged women gather for a traditional "gold day" (altın günü) exchange, and make brutal comments about 17-year-old Leyla’s physical appearance. As the tension escalates, reality begins to warp.

The story of a young director Fikret's deepening exploration of his sexual identity and freedom on a talk show.

The second film of the Pandemic Trilogy, “Why Am I Still Here Then?” is a sequel to 61 Street No 4, and it makes the audience experience the unconscious reflection of the Other who entered in the previous film. The monologues throughout the film emphasize the character's feeling of being stuck and her confrontation with the unconscious. As a result of the confrontation, the audience is left with a mind ready to be completely liberated. Experimental narrative, creative montage and sound design come to the forefront in “Why Am I Still Here Then?”, and it narrates us understanding and accepting our unconscious.

An experimental take on a nervous breakdown through a woman's unconscious.

An expanding wound from beyond. A scientist questioning reality itself. A woman becoming the site of something older than time.

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