HIÇBIR ŞEY NORMAL DEĞIL
STRANGE ABANDONED DERANGED
An eerie, ruinous landscape in the midst of beautiful nature and in close proximity to the Mediterranean - this is what today remains of Turkey's first eco-resort. Once conceived of as a tourist magnet equipped with an artificial farm, numerous animal sculptures and even a cable car, the Naturland Eco Park developed into a meeting place for Turkish celebrities from the worlds of business, culture and politics and also attracted foreign visitors. From the very beginning however, conservationists castigated the concept hotel as an environmentally-harmful prestige object. In his documentary, Ceylan Özgün Özçelik tells the story of what is now a dilapidated place, at times employing disconcerting elements such as a dance of death. Set to a contemporary original soundtrack from Turkish television, in turn making the project’s development more comprehensible, the director has dancers and actors perform a macabre ballet amongst the rubble and broken pieces of glass, empty swimming pools covered in puddles and sculptures disfigured by overgrowth. While the images testify to nature's delayed revenge, the soundtrack speaks of a misguided chapter in the development of Turkey’s tourist industry characterised by megalomania and costly miscalculations.
Text: Kira Taszman
09.11.2024 | 10:00 | Obenkino (original version with English subtitles)
10.11.2024 | 13:00 | Obenkino (original version with English subtitles)
Supporting film: THE IMPACT (Alexandra Chovanová, Michaela Steigerová, CZ 2023, 4 episodes, 26 min)
Armağan Lale
Zeynep Seçil
Mine Pakel, Serkan Köseoğlu
Ekin Fil
Ceylan Özgün Özçelik - Ceylan (1980) is an Istanbul-based filmmaker, making both features and shorts, fiction and docs that deal with memory and violence for the last fifteen years. Her debut feature INFLAME, had its premiere at the Berlinale’s Panorama Special and won the Gamechanger Award at SXSW in 2017. Ceylan was an artist-in-residence at BERLIN AIR and an SFFILM grantee with her previous project WITCH TRILOGY that tells its tales in different forms and stories by exploring violence against women. Her shorts and features were screened at Ann Arbor, Sitges, River’s Edge, RIDM, Dokufest, Her Docs, London Short FF, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, and many other festivals. Ceylan is a member of the European Film Academy.
