We Knew Her Well: Hippie Perihan

She came to Istanbul to invent another life.

5 min · Animation

In the late 1960s, Istanbul was the eastern gateway of the hippie trail to Kathmandu. The cheap hotels of Sultanahmet and the tables of the Pudding Shop were crowded with travelers from all over the world. Among them lived a local legend: Hippie Perihan. Having run away from Izmir at seventeen, Perihan lived her life as an experiment, in a society where a young woman's freedom to choose for herself came at a cost. Crowned "Queen of the Hippies" for the way she danced and laughed without restraint, she was found dead in a hotel room at nineteen. After her death, the press demeaned her, popular cinema rewrote her story, and a woman who claimed to speak with spirits began to speak in her name. Made entirely in a pixel-game aesthetic, this animation is a tribute to one of the most talked-about yet least-known cult female figures in Turkish history. It is also an experiment in how many times a woman's life can be rewritten in the memories of others. (Labocine)

Directed by Elif Dizdaroğlu