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The 16th İstanbul Documentary Days will start on June 10 and it will be focusing on the Baltic Poetic Documentary School.
The festival will screen more than seventy films under different themes, which will be Togetherness, No Other World, and Panorama of Turkey.
İstanbul Documentary Days to continue until June 15 will have as its motto in this edition a quote from a poem by Hasan Hüseyin Korkmazgil that says, "One side of me is dropping leaves while the other side is blossoming in spring."
The Baltic Poetic Documentary School, which stood out with its productivity and creativity in the 1960s in Lithuania, Letonia, and Estonia will be at the center of this year's festival.
Three films of documentarist Audrius Stonys from Lithuania will be shown, who will also be giving a lecture on filming as a festival guest.
The Petra Lataster-Czisch and Peter Lataster couple from the Netherlands and Somnur Vardar from Turkey are also guests of the festival this year.
The last film by the Lataster couple called "Journey Through Our World" was awarded the best documentary in the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and Vardar's last film "In Emptiness" was awarded the Best Documentary at the İstanbul Film Festival.
100th anniversary of James Joyce and Ulysses
Another important section of the 16th İstanbul Documentary Films is the "Ulysses European Odyssey" project realized in 18 "partner cities" in Europe on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Ulysses." The "Togetherness" section of the festival is prepared in the scope of the İstanbul program of this project.
In the documentary co-directed by Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel called "Translating Ulysses" (2023) we watch the struggle of translator Kawa Nemir when he translated Ulysses, the masterpiece of Joyce to his mother tongue Kurdish, in an effort to bring together Joyce, Anne Frank, Puccini, and Shakespeare.
All You See (Al Wat Je Ziet, 2022) in which Niki Padidar, a director from Iran films the migrants living in the Netherlands and asks us if we can manage living together is another important film in this section of the festival.
New awards
Panorama of Turkey section in which 29 new films will be screened will give us the opportunity to see the best documentaries shot in Turkey in the last year.
Petra Lataster-Czisch, Adar Bozbay, and Begüm Özden Fırat take part in the Johan van der Keuken New Talent award, and the festival will be giving awards for the best montage, best cinematography and best sound design this year.
The jury is made up of Deniz Eyüboğlu, director of cinematography, Osman Bayraktaroğlu mounted, and Mine Pakel, sound designer.
The screening of the films and the festival activities will take place in five different venues in İstanbul. These will be the French Cultural Center, Metrohan, Aynalı Geçit, Caddebostan Culture Center and Museum Gazhane.
(AÖ/PE)
