On the Wings of the Butterfly
2020, 22’ 22’’, Kurdish/Turkish (with English and Turkish subtitles)
Director: İlham Bakır
Camera and editing: Sara Jin, Ayşe Macit, İlham Bakır
Kurdish–Turkish translation: İlham Bakır
Turkish–English subtitle translation: Berke Göl
A mother, a father, a child… Or a teacher, a filmmaker, a student… In Di Perê Perperokê De (On the Wings of the Butterfly), İlham Bakır looks at his own family to observe the physical and emotional effects of ‘working from home’ during the pandemic. With the text-flows on screen, ringing phones, tangled cables, and internet connections; we are living in a world where life as a whole is transformed into work; and the borders between private life and work life have vanished. The experiences of a family from Diyarbakır – one of the cities that has been critically affected by the pandemic, exposes unseen distances. Di Perê Perperokê De is a film that engages with the effects of working from home on ‘intimacy’. It is a story of a child who misses his loved ones as much as he misses playing at the park. It is also the story of a teacher working from home, and a documentarist who records this period.
İlham Bakır
Born in Bitlis, İlham Bakır studied cinema, literature and drama. He has been working on stories, scripts and theatre plays. His short stories were published in various literature magazines, and anthologies. He is still writing on cinema and art critics for newspapers and various magazines. He has directed documentaries such as Verses To The Body (2003), Bread Does Not Hold Dirt (2007), as well as fiction shorts like Rêç (Trace, 2001) and Bê Sî û Bê Dar (Without Threes And Shadows, 2009). He is still lecturing about scriptwriting in Diyarbakır for Middle East Cinema Academy Association. He continues to shoot a feature-length documentary.
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 İlham Bakır was realized.
