This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
The rage to exist - that is what Sibel, the main character of our film, discovers. When she thought she already did the hardest by transcending her handicap and accepting her lonely life, Sibel ends up living an emancipation that she no longer expected, in this remote village full of traditional customs. This film is also the story of a discovery. Tough Sibel, with her strange and awkward beauty, discovers her feelings, her body, and her sexual desire. Her body becomes empowered by this new identity. With Ali, Sibel grows up and gains confidence. The film is a total immersion in the most mysterious questions of what will happen in Sibel’s head and body as she finally finds herself. And through this, our film aims to go beyond a simple denunciation of the conditions of women in a conservative and traditional society. To us, shooting in Turkey was crucial for us. The country is going through a very difficult time due to the exacerbation of tensions between the many communities of Anatolia. Nationalism is rising. There is a constant fear of the other, of the stranger. In our film, Ali is Kurdish, but he could be from Istanbul, Alevi, Armenia or Syria - the attitude towards him would be the exact same. For Sibel and her compatriots, it’s a question of experiencing alterity, which in our opinion is a universal experience, for it can be lived anywhere, at home just like in the high mountains of the Black Sea. In the end, Sibel experiences a new intimate personal birth and releases something new and fresh in the village. We hope the audience is filled with this new air and hope as they leave the theatres after SIBEL.