The Balcony and Our Dreams
13′ 40”, 2020, Turkish (with English subtitles)
Camera and editing: Aylin Kuryel
Editing advisor: Raşel Meseri
Sound mix: Fırat Yücel
Subtitle translation: Gözde Onaran
(The statue that appears is made by Florin Strejac.)
Even though ‘life fits in a house’, dreams don’t. They draw power from our recent past and worries, reaching beyond the limits of “reality”. Aylin Kuryel collected dreams about mandatory military service in her short documentary Dreams of Military Service (2017). And now with her new video, The Balcony and Our Dreams, she is offering a selection of dreams that are dreamt during the coronavirus outbreak. In Kuryel’s video; the longings, worries and desires that have been quarantined in the depths of mind come to the surface and interfuse with sounds, music, applauses and protests from the streets. Dreams permeate reality, and reality pervade dreams.
Aylin Kuryel
Aylin Kuryel is working as an academic at the Literary and Cultural Analysis Department at the University of Amsterdam. Kuryel is among the editors of the following books: Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi Press, 2011), Resistance and Aesthetics in the Age of Global Uprisings (İletişim Press, 2015), Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences (İletişim Press, 2017). Among the documentaries Kuryel has directed are Taboo (2009), Welcome Lenin (2015), Dreams of Military Service (2017), Heads and Tails (2019) and CemileSezgin (2020).
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 Aylin Kuryel was realized.
