VOICING VOICES

“Voicing Voices” consists of films produced by 12 women from Diyarbakır, Mardin and Batman between 2020-2021, and is part of “BAK: Revealing the City” program organized by Anadolu Kültür and Diyarbakır Arts Center and supported by Institut Français. Since 2012, the programhas been supporting the visual production of young storytellers and aims to create collective production and screening spaces as well as photography and video workshops. The programfeatures stories that are passed on from one person to another, evolving as they circulate rather than big, noisy, encompassing narratives about the city and memory.

IMAGE CAPTURE (FOTOĞRAF ALTI), 2021
Diyarbakır | Video, Color, 6’33’’ | Turkish
Director: Aylin Kızıl
Image Capture takes us on top of Helin Apartment – a tall building overlooking Diyarbakır Fortress and the surrounding neighborhoods, which are either demolished, reconstructed, or waiting to be demolished any moment now. The disembodied voice-over initially endeavors to rule over images but then slowly surrenders to them. As the voice starts to engage with the images, it slowly finds its body and place in the film’s world.

POSSIBLE (PEKAN Ê), 2021
Diyarbakır | Video, Color, 4’11’’ | Kurdish
Director: Berivan Karatorak
Possible gives you a shimmering glimpse into an ordinary day at Hevsel Gardens, which are at the core of cultural heritage and ecology debates in Diyarbakır. A day in which a woman dances on her own, searches for herself, explores her boredom, follows her curiosities; a day when she can actually breathe.

GRANDMA ZEKİ (PÎRÊ ZEKİ), 2021
Mardin | Video, Color, 6’36’’ | Kurdish
Director: Berivan Bagı
Grandma Zeki lives alone in a house with a garden located in one of Mardin’s villages. She welcomes us, alongside Berivan, into her elderly world, showcasing her rings and bracelets, basil in the garden, variety of pickles and other objects from her life that decorate her living room walls.

THE DOOR (KAPI), 2021
Diyarbakır | Video, Color, 7’19’’ | Turkish
Director: Evindar Tokur
The Door (Kapı) focuses on an effort to soothe the never-ending sorrow of murders committed by unknown perpetrators and forced migration by confronting the city. The film searches for the past by tracing artefacts of childhood, home and lost places in contemporary Diyarbakır while trying to hold personal and collective memory together.

MEHLA QORÊ, 2021
Diyarbakır | Video, Color, 8’24’’ | Kurdish
Director: Fatma Çelîk
Mehla Qorê recreates the neighborhood where Fatma spent her childhood by building on her very first memory. The film brings together photographs of Suriçi, the neighborhood destroyed during 2015 clashes, old family photo albums, recollections of women in her family and what they remember and disremember while accompanying Fatma’s quest to find her first memory.

THINK OF A CIRCLE (BİR ÇEMBER DÜŞÜN), 2021
Diyarbakır | Video, Color, 5’29’’ | Turkish
Director: Fatoş Güneri
Fatoş tries to find her way around the small alleyways of Diyarbakır with the help of fortunes. Each sentence uttered by the fortuneteller takes her on another path, paths she is destined to take, very alien and familiar to her at the same time. Bringing together voices of fortunetellers of Diyarbakır with documentary footage of the city, Think of a Circle (Bir Çember Düşün) transforms the memories of childhood places.

SPACE, FEHMİ AND THE SECRETS OF THE CITY (UZAY, FEHMİ VE ŞEHRİN SIRLARI), 2021
Mardin | Video, Color, 11’47’’ | Turkish
Director: Mediha Güzelgün
Space, Fehmi and the Secrets of the City, replaces the traditional narration of Mardin as a “fairy tale city” with a tale of space adventure set in Mardin, which intertwines the past with the future. The hospitable narrator of the film believes that beneath the fortress of the city lies Noah’s Ark, and that the ark was filled with types of people, not animals, before it anchored in Mardin. The narrator introduces us to Fehmi, who might as well be Noah.

STONE AND WATER (TAŞ VE SU), 2021
Batman | Video, Color, 5’14’’ | Turkish
Director: Nalin Acar
Hasankeyf has gone underwater following the construction of Ilısu Dam, and now decorates the walls of an ornamental pond in Batman. This pond, just like the historical Hasankeyf, has created its own ecosystem. This playful structure also aims at pointing at the weight of witnessing.

4 DECEMBER 2020, NUSAYBİN (4 ARALIK 2020, NUSAYBİN), 2021
Mardin | Video, Color, 4’13’’ | Turkish
Director: Rozerin Tadik
Rozerin’s grandfather’s house, where a total of 12 cousins including Rozerin and her siblings were born and raised, was among the thousands of houses destroyed during the clashes in Kurdish cities from 2014 to 2016. January 4, 2020 Nusaybin is a short visit to the childhood memories of two cousins on the phone, as one of them is standing on the balcony of an apartment in a mass housing complex built following the destruction in the same district.

CUDİ OF THE WISHES (CÛDÎYÊ MİRADAN), 2021
Diyarbakır | Animation, Color, 6’32’’ | No Dialogue
Director: Semiha Yıldız
Cudi of the Wishes treats the natural flow of four seasons in Cudi and the fallouts of conflicts that interrupt this flow by pivoting on a feeling from a childhood memory and images. It is an attempt at reconstructing the name of the mountain from within that geography in contrast to what outsiders have been attempting to do for decades.

HERE (Lİ VİR), 2021
Batman | Video, Color, 6’31’’| Turkish, Kurdish
Director: Sibel Öğe
With Here we take a step towards the concrete space left from the burned and demolished Batman Yılmaz Güney movie theater, which had hosted hundreds of films, plays, concerts and panels since 2005. The empty concrete space with an ambiguous future awaiting its destiny, transforms into a place when filled with voices from its past.

GLEANERS, DREAMS AND GREENS (AŞEFÇİLER, RÜYALAR, OTLAR), 2021
Diyarbakır | Video, Color, 5’21’’ | No Dialogue
Director: Zelal Sadak
Gleaners, Dreams and Greens fills the absence of aşefçi women - the women who used to pick the greens in the fields where no one sowed the seeds, or watered them, or defined their borders by putting up fences around them- at the bazaar named after them with a polyphonic whisper choir. Hevsel Gardens where aşefçis used to pick herbs shed light on the history of the market place rendered invisible with time.