Director Ceylan Özgün Özçelik answered questions from Zeynep Karaca of Independent Türkçe. Özçelik, who addresses memory, violence, and women’s struggle in works such as Kaygı, Hiçbir Şey Normal Değil, and Cadı Üçlemesi, said that a system that fails to protect women feeds violence.
Noting that women are left alone, unheard, and unseen in the face of violence, Özçelik emphasized that violence against women is not unique to the Middle East or third world countries; it exists in Sweden and America as well, and it is on the rise. Pointing to the importance of women’s solidarity, the director described women’s invisible struggle with the words, “We are living under an occupation.”
Explaining society’s “memorylessness” by the sheer number of events taking place, Özçelik said the brain may not be able to bear so much trauma, massacre, and loss. She stated that small pauses are needed in order to survive, but that nothing should be forgotten. She said she finds the archival work of Hafıza Merkezi valuable and noted that during the Kaygı period they held a joint event titled “To Forget or to Remember?”
Özçelik said her first feature-length screenplay was a story set in the Black Sea region, where she was born and raised; she believes that a filmmaker making a film about a subject they do not know well would not constitute honest cinema. She noted that she grew distant from this story as Istanbul and the country changed, and that the effect of urban transformation on erasing memory is very powerful.
Why it matters
This interview stands apart in questioning the widespread approach that regards violence against women as a problem of only certain geographies; Özçelik’s examples of Sweden and the United States are a reminder that the issue has a systemic dimension independent of the level of development. Her positioning of cinema as part of memory work also opens up for debate the role of artists in the face of societal traumas. The connection she draws between urban transformation and forced forgetting raises a rarely discussed question about how the physical alteration of cities erodes collective memory. The joint work carried out with Hafıza Merkezi, meanwhile, shows that archiving and remembering are regarded as an active form of struggle. The interview leaves open the question of how far women’s solidarity and artistic testimony resonate in the fight against violence.