Interrogating the shifting identities of immigrants and their haters, Correction (Thanos Anastopoulos, 2007) has a documentary style handheld cinematography in its depiction of migration as a current socio-cultural as well as economic phenomenon. It focuses on two characters; an Albanian immigrant and an ultra-nationalist Greek in Greece. The main protagonist Yorgos’ ‘destruction’ of an Albanian person implies the destruction of his own identity and potentially future, which …
Category: Ozduzen Ozge
Gazing the Cinematic City of Split
Split is a very cinematic city with its cultural history, landscape, people and nature. Inspired by Boris Poljak, a great cinematographer, filmmaker and our ‘guide’ for a day, this photo diary represents my cinematic gaze over this little pearl of the Mediterranean beauty. Although multiplexes took over this part of the world too, the regional …
Reflecting Politics and New Cinema in Turkey: the Istanbul Film Festival in 2016
By Ozge Ozduzen International Istanbul Film Festival (IFF) was launched in 1982 by the IKSV (the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts). As the biggest film event in Istanbul for almost 35 years, it has been a unique space for Turkish, Kurdish and other filmmakers whose films would otherwise struggle to find a space in …
On the Complex Harmony of Academia and Film Criticism
In his workshop on film criticism in Athens on the 22nd of January, 2016, Jean-Michel Frodon, who was an editor in chief of Cahiers du cinema, argued that film reviews are facts in society; they are academic materials but also (potential) works of art. In his ‘negative’ approach to film criticism, however, Frodon identified four bad …
Özge about Athens
“In my experience of my stay in Athens, I was able to portray the urban decay in Athens but also the hopeful every day culture in Greece. In terms of Greek cinema, the representation in the short films such as Working Day, Seven Steps and Pledge were important for my understanding of different traditions in …
A Dark but Wonderful Night in Split
A Wonderful Night in Split (Arsen A. Ostojic, 2004) portrays the lives of Croatian people -especially the youth- in the aftermath of the fall of socialist Yugoslavia and the war of independence in Croatia, where the youth’s life was constantly challenged by social exclusion, unemployment, violence and drug abuse. The vast open space of the …