Darkroom. 2022. Turkey/USA. Directed by Asli Baykal. World premiere. In Turkish; English subtitles. 14 min.
Unutma Biçimleri (Forms of Forgetting). 2023. Turkey. Written and directed by Burak Çevik. North American premiere. In Turkish; English subtitles. 70 min.
A long time ago, Nesrin and Erdem were a couple. In Burak Çevik’s enigmatic third feature, they reunite and revisit their relationship, but neither can remember what caused them to break up. As the pair ponder the vagaries of memory and the small but abiding gaps that accumulate over time, their narration coalesces around evocative but fleeting images, a loose collection of ruins, fragments, and outlines. A hole cut into the icy surface of a frozen lake, a former prison structure at the water’s edge, the construction site for a new museum in Turkey. Beneath its airy and winding elegance, Forms of Forgetting is poignant in its grappling with loss and the slippery nature of memory. “Do I forget everything in order to remember,” asks the director, “or do I remember because I forget?”
Asli Baykal’s Darkroom, created with the young participants of the Sirkhane Darkroom Workshop in a border town between Turkey and Syria, opens the screening program. In it, children roam the area, looking at the world through the viewfinders of analog cameras, in an intimate vision of the medium as a form of play and a way to forge an alternate reality in a conflict zone.