Biennial films on screen at film fest

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The program brings together documentaries, feature films, and video works tackling the themes of citizenship, the public domain, democracy and art.

The film selection of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, ‘Am I Not a Citizen? Barbarism, Civic Awakening, and the City,’ is to be included in the program of the Istanbul Film Festival. The program is a collaboration between the Istanbul Biennial and the Istanbul Film Festival. As part of the 32nd Istanbul Film Festival, the program serves as a prelude to the biennial exhibition, and aims to incite reflections on the overarching theme of the biennial: the public domain as a political public forum.

The Biennial program, organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) under the curatorship of Fulya Erdemci, Yael Messer, Gilad Reich and assistant curatorship of Ece Üçoluk, will be presented at the Pera Museum during the 32nd Istanbul Film Festival.

The program brings together documentaries, feature films, and video art works tackling the themes of citizenship, public domain, democracy and art. It features canonical films, as well as recent documentaries, and explores the poetics and politics of its subjects through video works.

“Am I Not a Citizen? Barbarism, Civic Awakening and the City” features 17 films and video art works using diverse cinematic practices that question the limits of civilization in our day and age. It focuses on the destabilizing force of this current system and the diverse responses through which notions of barbarism, activism, and civic participation are redefined.

The program will run until April 14.

Challenging films in biennial program

Artists, directors and filmmakers offer viewers a platform to contemplate the public domain as a site of cultural, social and political engagement and insurrection. Among the films in “Am I Not a Citizen?” are challenging works proposing different economic models, sketches for building a utopia, and exercises in civic imagination.

The 13th Istanbul Biennial film program will also include a panel discussion on how cinema explores and articulates the complex notions of barbarism, activism, and civic participation and the role of filmmakers in proposing alternatives to existing spaces and current realities. The panel discussion, in the framework of the program, will be held on April 8 at Pera Museum.