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Director's Statement
Everything began when my brother Mahmut took a decision to divorce his newly wed wife and my sister Zeynep was ready to end her engagement in 2017. I took my camera and went back to the village.
My intention was to film my siblings and the people around them while seeking a solution. I thought things would be easier by looking through the lens of a camera as if what I film was not the real life but a filmmaker’s fantasy world.
After a trial period realizing the outcomes of documenting these events, I followed my siblings’ on-going story for over three years until 2020. I stayed behind the camera and rarely interacted with them though my presence as the eldest son of this family was felt. I travelled back to the village alone with little image and sound equipment to capture the true intimacy. In a way, I was in a privileged position to film my siblings, parents and kinsmen for they have let me dwell into their lives. I even felt like they have been waiting for someone to listen to them. I wasn’t expecting them to be that open to be filmed at any moment. For them, I was a person who was listening with a camera and I didn’t want to break this coherence. To give the camera a subjective perspective, I placed it as if it was my eyes. I tried to create a fluid structure of telling in the film wishing to follow a logic of revealing information, that is, beginning with the effects on the individuals and zooming out towards the causes, the origins.
I tried hard not to cast any moral judgment on the events; instead I wanted to let the events reveal their own meanings. Principally, I took my siblings, Mahmut and Zeynep’s point of views on their lives, how they seek a solution while still keeping the family ties intact. I looked for images to create meanings of the interior conflicts. I tried to have more than just faces and expressions. I wanted to capture these “new individuals” feelings, their helplessness while trying to create their own mode of life.