24th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Meteors
director: Gürcan Keltek
original title: Meteorlar
country: Turkey, Netherlands
year: 2017
running time: 85 min.
synopsis
People are transformed from hunters into victims and the city is hit by rockets and meteors on the same day. Through the eyes of actress Ebru Ojen, this strange docu-fiction captures the historical memory of one Kurdish town in eastern Turkey, which is stricken by armed conflict and where martial law throws daily life into a frozen timelessness. The director’s original combination of various cinematic styles with recycled video material joins the film’s many fragments into visually and musically interrelated chapters that mix political commentary with a documentary essay about a disappearing world.
“Our behaviours relate to a certain geographic location and its history. It shapes our memories, how we remember them. What happened back then is a faded memory now, and Meteors is my re-imagining of how we remember everything.” G. Keltek
biography
Gürcan Keltek (1974) studied film at the DEU film school in Turkey. He has directed numerous short films, advertisements and music videos. His feature-length documentary debut Meteors won the prestigious Swatch Art Peace Hotel Award at last year’s 70th Locarno Film Festival. The Ji.hlava IDFF previously showed his films Over Time (2012) and Colony (2015).
more about film
| director: | Gürcan Keltek |
| producer: | Gürcan Keltek, Marc Van Goethem |
| photography: | Mustafa Şen, Fırat Gürgen |
| editing: | Fazilet Onat |
| sound: | Marc Van Goethem |
other films in the section
The brutal Belgian colonial policy, the Austrian oppression of the Balkans, and ethnic conflicts after the breakup of Yugoslavia – these seemingly unrelated historical episodes create one line of the documentary. In the film, history becomes a kind of speech, which often leads to the inability to formulate a complete sentence in the statements of a person suffering from loss of speech or speech disorder. In three acts, the film looks for words to describe and understand the existence of the museum of the Belgian colonial history, the hovering of Kurt Waldheim before the commission investigating his involvement in SS, and the infamous photograph of the Belgrade’s most popular DJ kicking the head of a dead woman.
“Slavenka Drakulic once wrote that if we believe that the perpetrators are monsters it is because we would like to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’. Aphasia came as a result of questioning that distance.” J. Juresa
Aphasia
Jelena Jureša
Belgium / 2019 / 80 min.
section: First Lights
International Premiere
The theme of domestic violence is discussed in the public more often than before, but it still remains a burning issue victims are afraid to talk about. The director deals with the issue from an unusual perspective in a stylized documentary: she does not only describe the problem, but lets us experience it together with three female characters, using subjectifying methods based on testimonies of actual victims of domestic violence. Their inner voices describe how diffi cult it is to prevent or break up the relationship with the abuser. Then their actions suggest possible solutions.“For women, home is the most dangerous place. This movie resulted from the desire to let women tell their stories shame free. The viewer experiences their journey.” A.-S. Richard
IN MY SKIN
Anna-Sophia Richard
Germany / 2019 / 72 min.
section: First Lights
International Premiere
A fable-like documentary composed of footage from different corners of the planet juxtaposes animals and humans like two separate yet connected universes. Virtually without speech, with a heavy emphasis on the audio component, it tells the story of an island of untamed cats and mysterious antennas that broadcast to the world on long-wave radio a call for liberation from the economic and social ties that bind us. Everywhere the radio waves reach, we see static shots of human bondage and animal freedom, and by linking these contrasting images, an Eisenstein-style montage emerges, with new cinematic meaning.„Everything started with an image in my head: a world without pets. That image became a documentary essay with a science fiction atmosphere, about freedom, work, domestic animals and societies in capitalism.“ J. Maito
Owner’s Portrait
Joaquín Maito
Argentina / 2018 / 80 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
Producer Čestmír Kopecký had originally wanted to make a film about the changing face of Brno, but in the end director Robin Kvapil and co-writer Pavel Šplíchal created something more closely resembling Šplíchal’s ironic blog Prigl. In their “lovingly anarchistic” film, Brno forms the epicentre of a sarcastic look at Czech society. The naive and vacuous communist-era documentary with which Kvapil’s film opens gives way to the reporter’s bitter monologues right in front of the camera. These are intercut with acted sequences featuring Brno’s political elites, artists, and outcasts.“People say that Brno is the only joke that is inhabitable. The entire film follows this logic.” R. Kvapil
Everything´s Gonna Be Fine
Robin Kvapil
Czech Republic / 2017 / 71 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
The filmmaker’s family falls into crisis when her father is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease – a condition in which the brain stops producing dopamine, the hormone responsible for muscle movement and happiness. At the same time, Natalia is coming out to her parents, former left-wing social activists, something for which they have no understanding. In her intimate and contemplative film, the director interviews her relatives about their life stories and, through an intergenerational dialogue, tries to reach a mutual respect and family harmony that could help her sick father.
“Making films is my way of experiencing the world, the most organic form of inhabiting it that I have ever felt. Dopamine, my first feature film, was a necessity and a beautiful exorcism.” N. Imery Almario
Dopamina
Natalia Imery Almario
Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina / 2019 / 87 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
The film takes a look at the recent history of two Middle Eastern countries torn by war – Iraq and Syria – from the perspective of local residents who have made the decision to flee their homes and seek asylum in Austria. It’s made up of a montage of conversations with refugees and amateur videos and images from various social networks and online platforms depicting events in both countries. Sand and Blood links individual stories and histories which are intended to awaken a deeper interest in the topic. Instead of a political film, the director considers his work to be something like a painting or poem.
„A film that forces the viewer to question the very nature of good and evil, victim and perpetrator.” M. Krepp
Sand and Blood
Matthias Krepp
Austria / 2017 / 90 min.
section: First Lights
East European Premiere
The city of Kobani lies in Syria on the border of the sphere of influence of the Islamic State, Turkey and the Kurds. Representatives of these three opposing parties battled it out between the years 2014 and 2016 during a war conflict that claimed the lives of many civilians, including thirty-three Turkish citizens who had come there beforehand for various reasons. Conceptualized as a film in their memory, the filmmakers use symbolism to follow their fateful journey as they set off for a city in ruins. The footage is complemented by double exposures of the survivors' faces, who tell of the untimely deaths of their friends and relatives.
“Set Off was an exercise about how and what to tell, after an unmourned disaster; a journey parallel to theirs, daydreaming in the middle of a conflict zone, where landscape deconstructs power regimes.“ M. E. Büyükcoskun
Set Off
Mustafa Emin Büyükcoskun
Germany, Turkey / 2019 / 63 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
On average, our eyes remained fixed on an advertisement for six seconds. Advertisements are probably the most common ideological channel that we encounter in visible form. Director Luis Ortiz has based his documentary film on this contrast à la thèse. The visual aspect of the film is made up of 57 one-minute static views of advertising. The soundtrack features texts that challenge the existence of ideology as such (the Borges story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius) and draws attention to the fact that we often confuse it with ontology (the critics of neoliberalism, such as Ignacio Ramonet and Noam Chomsky).“In times of political extremism I find it necessary to ask which mechanisms undermine democracy in the so called modern societies, then new progressive answers are needed to confront the simplistic discourses from the right.”
Metaphysics and Democracy
Luis Ortiz
Germany, Colombia / 2016 / 59 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
The film’s main topics are migration and the integration of immigrants into their new society. #3511 explores these issues through the story of an Australian soldier whose daily correspondence and diary from his time traveling during World War I are combined with a short story by J. L. Borges. His particular life story is a metaphor for contemporary questions regarding exile, memory, and integration. In terms of form, the film consists primarily of footage of an abandoned landscape and homes, accompanied by a voiceover commentary. On rare occasions, we can see the speakers’ faces.
„The film began from a serendipitous coincidence : fiction and reality. 100 years later the material challenged the limits of what could be, known and reconstructed. But what if fiction were to pose reality as an enigma ?“ I.Stillwell
#3511
Isaac Stillwell
Australia, France, Belgium, Germany, Poland / 2018 / 68 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
Physicist Catarina, dedicated to her work and teaching at university, has come close to a breakthrough discovery in her research on quantum mechanics. She discovered a so far unknown level of sound spectrum, which is to become key in new perspectives of looking at the world. This simple film with a powerful concept is not merely a story of a Brazilian female scientist, but it also offers a commentary about our (in)ability to capture reality. The rather non-traditional topic of the film corresponds with its unusual form: it consists simply of very long, seemingly static images.
“To keep the possible and impossible in life in tension. To build an escape line from this journey. To create a crack in the wall that surrounds us. That is the most important reason to make films for me.” C. Segundo
Slits
Carlos Segundo
Brazil, France / 2019 / 78 min.
section: First Lights
International Premiere
In Kharkov, Ukraine lies Derzhprom Palace. The constructivist building, built between 1925 and 1927, was intended to embody the idea of communism. The palace soon became a symbol of the new society and inspired many avant-garde artists, e.g. Mayakovsky, Ejsenstein, Vertov and Dovzhenko. The film captures the current bustling activity of the building at a slow pace and offers a kaleidoscope of different perspectives. Through archival materials - building plans and contemporary film footage - it maps the history of the building and creates tension between the past and present, the new and old parts, the duties of employees and two astonished tourists wandering about.“Like rag-pickers of history, we look at the fragments left over from a time when a new society seemed possible, convinced that history is ultimately about the people who inhabit it” M. Mester, T. Kononenko
The Building
Matilda Mester, Tatjana Kononenko
Germany, Ukraine / 2019 / 93 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
Nearly 10 years after the conflict in Georgia, Georgian inhabitants of the Russian-occupied territory are still living in temporary camps, waiting to return home. Their dwellings are cookie-cutter houses. They brought only the few items that they managed to grab from their homes when fleeing from the occupation army. Equally austere, almost as empty as their provisional housing, they live their lives at the mercy of waiting for what is to come. In this meditative documentary, real relics of their past lives, everyday things brought from their original homes, are the most tangible manifestations of the irreversibility of time as measured by losses.
“We attempted to reflect about war experience from particular perspective, to meet persons rather than statistics, to observe rather than inquire, to contemplate about something we all share - the attachments.” Nino Gogua
The Things
Nino Gogua
Georgia / 2016 / 62 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
