Fırat Yücel

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 with Stella takes place in an apartment overlooking one of the streets where, during the 21st Feminist Night March in Istanbul, women find each other despite all obstacles. Fragmented conversations with Stella Ovadia, one of the founding figures of post-1980 feminist struggle in Turkey, on feminism, socialism, minority identity, and political life become charged by chants and sirens rising from outside. As the camera moves outside to join the protest, the memory of past struggles and the political action of the present appear within the same frame.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.