A conversation and screening with Cana Bilir-Meier and belit sağ

MODERATION: NANNA HEIDENREICH

FILM-MAKER: »YOU STAY SILENT, ONLY WE TALK.«
PROTAGONIST: »HA!«
FILM-MAKER: »NOW WE’LL STAY SILENT AND YOU TALK.«
DIALOGUE FROM SEPT- OCT. 2015, CIZRE | REGIE: BELIT SAĞ

Cana: When putting your own stance into a context, as well as inside a discussion, it’s really important to clarify from where you speak and to whom you address. For example, I researched migration in Germany, as well as Turkish history of the 60s, when my grandparents came as guest workers. I started to work with the archive of my family and research existing archives. […]. How do we remember? Who gains advantages from remembering? Remembering is an unfinished process and fragmented in itself. And it’s highly linked to writing a certain kind of history in the form of reconstruction—a process of adding a new story—and it’s important who writes it, who collects it, who is speaking, who can enter it and how can it be used? […].

belit: How can we transform the archive? I’m involved in bak.ma [a digital media archive of social movements in Turkey] and our question was how to make an archive that is dynamic, that people can use, contribute to, and search in different ways. One that is as accessible as possible. […] An archive has to be as dynamic as life. A personal archive has a lot of different characteristics, definitely every work one does, first and foremost, talks about that person.

Cana: Another question I am dealing with is the border between yourself and the other. While developing a project, you are filming, you see the news on television, you look at yourself, you talk to people, and you have the archive and memory. After a while everything gets mixed. You are playing with different points of view. For me, making films or writing texts is never something complete.

This dialogue is an excerpt of the article »Dokumentaristiken – Dokumentation und ihre Eigenschaften« taken from the magazine Version Nr. 3.