Turkish Delight

Loosely inspired by Stefan Zweig’s novella, in which playing chess is depicted as a means of surviving fascism, The Avalanche recounts the events of the Armenian genocide, still contested by the Turkish state. Pinar Öğrenci uses archives and present-day footage of the region to uncover the traumas left by the Armenian people on their landscape and their memories.

Inventory 2021 is a remake of the original film Inventur-Metzstrasse 11 shot by Yugoslav director Želimir Žilnik in Munich in 1975. In this second version of his film, set in the city of Chemnitz and shot in 2021, Öğrenci offers an alternative look at the situation of people of different genders, ages and ethnicities living in Germany as immigrants. As in the original work, the filming takes place inside the building where the people are supposedly staying, who, one after the other, introduce themselves to the camera by briefly telling who they are and how they live their situation as immigrants.

For Glück auf in Deutschland, Öğrenci set out to trace the presence of first-generation so-called “guest worker” miners in the Ruhr Area, but the regional archives she consulted yielded very little. Drawing on available materials and oral histories, this 44-minute film brings together photographs, documentary montage and the artist’s off-screen narration to reimagine postwar industrial life in the Ruhr Area from the perspective of those frequently left out of official narratives and repositories of memory. Öğrenci’s use of the phrase “Glück auf” – a common way that miners wish one another a safe return after their dangerous work underground – resonates with the experiences of immigrant communities in present-day Germany faced with right-wing extremism.

Pınar Öğrenci’s first documentary film examines the effects of discriminatory urban policies implemented in the 1980s in Berlin on “guest workers.” The starting point of the film is IBA (International Bau Austellung), the post-war urban renewal project carried out in the district of Kreuzberg between 1984 and 87. The photographs taken by the architect Heide Moldenhauer, who worked for IBA, and various archival materials form the basis of the film. Nearly forty years after they were taken, Öğrenci finds the people in the photographs to hold interviews with them and displays the hidden history of Kreuzberg through the experiences and solidarity stories of women immigrants.