Ghosts of the City
9′ 56”, 2020, Turkish (with English subtitles)
Camera and editing: Fatih Pınar
Subtitle translation: Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş
Fatih Pınar, outspoken video-activist and documentary filmmaker, turns his camera to the empty streets now filled with spectres that haunt the city’s past as well as the future.
The streets are empty because of the pandemic, but the crowds are just a blink away. In Ghosts of the City, a variety of footage that Fatih Pınar excavated from his social opposition archive (which he himself recorded) are penetrating the empty spaces of today. As the crowds keep appearing and disappearing, the video jumps between the recent past and present to expose the political dominance built over the urban spaces of Istanbul.
Fatih Pınar
Fatih Pınar worked as a house photographer of Atlas Magazine between 1998-2004 and created photo-interviews. As multimedia, video-activism and social media mediums rose, he started to produce video-interviews. As an independent newsagent and a video-journalist, Pınar shot short and long feature documentaries that trace the political and social agenda. Fatih Pınar’s latest documentary, Murder Not Accident (2019) was the opening film of 15th Labor Film Festival, which was organized online. Pınar also conducted a video workshop at Altyazı Cinema Association in December 2019.
This video is produced for Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema’s Looking Outside series. Following the first screening of the video, a live conversation (in Turkish) with Fatih Pınar was realized.
