Years ago, when Funda Tuğrul set out to prepare a historical almanac for Flying Broom, she requested that I pen a piece of writing, which I failed to do, nonetheless, my mind drowned in the guilt of not fulfilling my promise to Funda as much as it remained in that unwritten piece. When Dilek shared with me the title of this year’s Women’s Film Festival and asked me to pen a piece of writing for the catalog, it was as if I had encountered again the line I had placed in the last line of the piece I could not write. I refrained from telling Dilek Metin Sert that I had already placed two lines of Fürug Ferruhzad’s poem The Bird May Die, Keep the Flight in Mind in the title of a piece I wrote for a catalog prepared for another year of the festival, but I could not abstain pen this small piece of writing.

What was it about this poem that moved us all like this, maybe a predisposition to beginnings, perhaps to preludes, a predisposition to what has not yet occurred, perhaps to what will never happen, a redisposition to the ecstatic, the imaginary, the goblin and witchy state of restarting…

Like many women of my generation, it was through the Istanbul Film Festival that I learned to chase good films. In those years, before 1980, when it was believed that it was possible for everything to change, we were shuttling between Beyoğlu cinemas in search of “good films”, discovering other films instead of the Yeşilçam-Hollywood films that dominated our childhood and adolescence; we were learning about cinemas by countries and directors’ films introduced togetherness that did not fit into matinees and soirees. Those who enjoyed the pleasure of learning did not have to go far, the Cinematheque in Sıraselviler was always there.

In the Ankara of the post-military coup period, when I was still learning a lot, how could I not notice that the masculine gaze, which prevented the women’s labor accumulated in cinema from being historicized by trivializing women directors and finding a thousand and one ways to belittle their stories, was turning towards inventing a genre called “women’s films” that was not included in the good films I mentioned above, I was at ILEF. On the same floor as the movie theater... While the theoretical debates on women’s cinema were multiplying with research on women’s audience practices, critical schools sought to increase the experiences that produced the counter-speech. Eisenstein’s sisters had not sweated in the editing rooms for years in vain; the labor accumulated there was dismantled into a completely different cinematographic narrative. In Alice Guy’s cabbages, they found a narrative of how fairy tales are turned inside out in movies. The rape scenes of white women were no longer relevant, and that nation was never born. As rape narratives, the projection of violence at home in a cinema, layered up, as women’s road stories in films merged into stories of liberation, and as we see in Camille Claudel’s biopic, the determination that the anger that was destroyed in places of irreconcilability, in the attic and the mental hospital, needed visual expression, left the word neither to the movie theater nor to universities and recreated the meeting place called the women’s film festival.

Someone who learns about good films through festivals and who is deeply attached to women’s cinema could not stay away from the first women’s film festival in Ankara and its festive beginnings. From the second women’s film festival onwards, together with the young women I had the pleasure of working with, we worked for hours to locate the woman director on the posters, we made all kinds of images of the camera with women’s hands, we wrote subtitles, we prepared discussion and interview programs, we even did film production, we were surprised together at the last minute things that always got done. We discovered feminist films, we were saddened and disappointed that all the kitchen work of our labor was rendered invisible, we had fun laughing together at our favorite movie scenes at the meetings. The women’s film festival became a part of women’s public sphere, and thinking about feminist film became a ground for discussing different experiences of womanhood. It was added to dozens of public conversation paths such as women’s bookstores, women’s publishing houses, and women’s writers’ houses. It created the opportunity to reflect on different feminist experiences. Young women in Ankara have been creating for 27 years. But as the poet says: “Then we learned that the world is round, we stayed.”

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Even if we think that resentments, lack of imagination, self-carving, and drifts have settled in all the stays, even if there is nothing that crystallizes memories like being somewhere at the time of a flight, even if it is difficult to find a state of partnership as beautiful as being there at that moment, discovering with that groping, covering each other’s mistakes, and rejoicing with hundreds of women’s stories in dark halls, feminisms have fortunately multiplied in the past thirty years or so. We can list dozens of reasons such as the multiplication of women’s emancipation by dividing into generations/waves that have difficulty in transferring experience to each other, the tears shed for the sake of overcoming the waves being blurred with love, the interruption of the juxtaposition of the university and the women’s movement, but in the end, the world is round...

If it wasn’t for the creative labor of young women, I wouldn’t be able to remember. If we can sing that verse together with young women who create a moment of flight in the common body of Funda Tuğrul, Pembe Behçetoğulları, Sevilay Çelenk and Ürün Güner, who will always remain young for me; that is very soon we will be able to produce an animated film about the dreams of Ayşe Hanım, the captain of a ship sailing from Izmir to Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, a documentary film about the Kurdish Women’s Movement, a biographical film by Gani Met, a dramatic film about a socialist university lecturer who stays in Istanbul in search of his wife, who was disappeared by the Assad regime in Syria, and his encounter with a feminist who was stripped of her profession by a state of emergency decree.

Until then, “Keep the Flight in Mind.”

Mavi Körfez Ferry, Üçkuyular-Bostanlı
April 2024