Istanbul CineCollective is an international film residency project that supports and
accompanies filmmakers in developing their fiction, documentary, or hybrid film projects
(for both first and second-feature-length films). This initiative aims to create an environment
conducive to creativity, mutual learning, and collaboration, thus providing a unique platform
for cultural and artistic exchange while enabling project development on a regional scale.

The main objective of this workshop is to provide a space where filmmakers can receive
personalized support from regional and French industry experts. This support is
intended to help them advance their projects, take a decisive step forward in their
development, and find partners and co-producers. This regional module aims to create
a hub for creators and to foster the emergence of projects on a regional scale.

At the heart of this program lies the desire to create a community and avenues for
collaboration among residents beyond a traditional workshop. By fostering exchanges and
interactions among participants, we aim to create a dynamic environment where ideas can be
shared, discussed, and enriched. This approach also cultivates lasting relationships among
filmmakers from different nationalities, thus promoting cultural diversity and mutual
understanding.

Although groups will be formed (one for documentary and one for fiction), several sessions
will be shared, including masterclasses by renowned directors. Unlike other residencies,
special attention will be given to hybrid projects that offer new narrative forms and break
away from overly strict conventions.

What do we offer?
Istanbul CineCollective offers a capacity-building program: a one-week gathering in June
2024 with inspiring workshops, lectures, and international exchange programs to generate
this creative and collaborative space.

Who are we working with?
Beykoz Kundura and Institute France designed the framework. Beykoz Kundura established in
2018, this major cultural center in Istanbul provides new meeting spaces and production
opportunities in culture and thought.

Who can join?
Istanbul CineCollective is open to every filmmaker who practices documentary, fiction, or hybrid,
is keen on improving methodologies in depth, and is also looking for self-development as a

creative practitioner. It is not limited to local filmmakers in Turkey; it is an international platform
that believes the transcultural aspect of the art of cinema is crucial for innovative approaches in
shaping the material of reality.
Candidates will be selected through an open call for applications, ensuring a diversity of profiles
and projects. Selection criteria will include the artistic quality of the projects, their potential for
development on a regional scale, and the filmmakers' motivation and commitment. The workshop
will be open to filmmakers of Iranian, Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Turkmenistan, and
Armenian nationalities.

Istanbul CineCollective will be held at Beykoz Kundura from June 24 to 29, 2024.

Category: Documentary Film / Fiction Film / Hybrid
Location: Beykoz Kundura İstanbul, Turkey (Accommodation and training on the site)

Important Dates:
Application: April 29th - May 24th
Announcement of Selected Projects: June 3rd
Residential Development Program: June 24th-29th, 2024 (On the site Beykoz Kundura)

Conditions of Participation

Participants must be proficient in English and have advanced upper-intermediate or
advanced-level knowledge.

Participants must attend the entire program; successful applicants must sign a memorandum
of agreement.

Artists can apply this to their film projects at the early stage of development. They must
present an idea for the application to work on throughout the lab.

We expect you to have at least 1 feature-length documentary/fiction/hybrid or 3 short films (Screened at an international film festival).

The applicants can enroll from the following regions.
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Turkmenistan,Turkey

Istanbul CineCollective provides accommodation and travel expenses (including breakfast and dinner), workshop training, and passes to ticketed events.
Istanbul CineCollective aims to create a safe, sustainable, and inclusive environment of mutually acknowledging debate, dialogue, and exchange in which everyone is treated equally. We, at this moment, declare that the selection process of the participants and the workshops will not include any form of favoritism, hurtful language, discrimination, abuse, marginalization, insulting behavior on the grounds of gender, ethnicity, religion, background, skin color, religious belief, sexuality, gender identity, socio-economic class, caste, disability, or age.

This program is designed by Beykoz Kundura in partnership with Institut Français.

Key Dates

  • April 29th: CineCollective Open Call Applications Begin
  • May 24th: Applications Deadline
  • June 3rd: CineCollective Participant Announcement to Public
  • June 24th-29th, 2024: CineCollective Programme (On-Site in Istanbul)

Jury

Selcen Ergun is a director, screenwriter and producer based in İstanbul - Paris. She is a 2018 Berlinale Talents, Berlinale Script Station and 2019 Medienboard Nipkow Berlin Artist-in-Residency alumna. She is a member of European Film Academy. She has an honors degree in Industrial Design / Visual Culture from METU and a master’s degree in Directing and Screenwriting from Bilgi University. She has written and directed short films which won several prizes around the world. She has directed music videos, interactive films and commercials for many esteemed brands. She has also given courses on visual culture, photography, scriptwriting and directing. In 2018, she founded her own production company, Albino Zebra Film. Her debut feature, 'Snow and the Bear' - a Turkish, German, Serbian co-production supported by Eurimages – premiered at Toronto International Film Festival 2022 in the Discovery Section. It was nominated for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and won many international awards including the New Directors Award for Best Film at the 66th San Francisco International Film Festival, Best First Film and Best Actress Awards at the 59th Antalya International Film Festival among others.
Samuel Aubin made his first movie in 1996 in Cambodia, a short documentary, La saison des cyclo-pousse. He finished Khuong Mê's Dark Room, his first feature documentary about the Vietnamese filmmaker, after four years of writing, shooting and editing, in 2002. In 2004, he directed Épopée, his first short fiction and discovered the post-soviet world through a first trip in Central Asia where he shot a part of a new movie, Tell Me Another Love Story, an auto-fiction and documentary, finished in 2013. During his many visits to post-soviet countries to support documentary projects for Eurasiadoc program, he wrote his first novel, Le pommier rouge d'Alma-Ata(Turquoise Éditions) and he started to direct and produce Ara Güler, Once Upon A Time Istanbul, a documentary that he finished in 2017. His second novel, Istanbul à jamais was published by Actes Sud in 2020 and was awarded by the Franco-Swiss Lettres frontières prize. Since 2012 he has been tutoring documentary script writing with Eurasiadoc and works with filmmakers from Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan. Since 2019, he has programmed a documentary series at the Lyon National Opera in partnership with the cinema platform tenk.fr. In April 2024, he was a lecturer at Hamilton College, New York, about making documentaries.
Nino Orjonikidze is a Georgian documentary filmmaker, the author of several award-winning documentaries produced with ARTEFACT Production she co-founded 15 years ago. She studied TV Journalism and documentary at Goldsmiths, University of London (MA), and Journalism & Cinema Studies at Tbilisi State University (BA). Nino Orjonikidze has been a film commissioning editor at Chai Khana Media platform for the last 9 years, where she curates short film production in the South Caucasus, alongside mentoring young talents from the region. She is a professor at GIPA, teaching documentary filmmaking at both BA and MA levels, and also tutors internationally, participating in international exchange academic programs or training initiatives. Nino is often a jury member of different international film festivals be it a Tampere Film Festival, Finland, One World Media Awards, UK or CineDoc, Georgia. Nino is a founding member of the Documentary Film Association DOCA-Georgia. “A Tunnel” is her most recent documentary, a co-production with ZDF/ARTE and Ventana Film, premiered at IDFA in 2019. It has won several awards at different film festivals including the Grand Prix at Trento Film Festival.
S. Buse Yıldırım - Istanbul-based director and curator. She has been curating films and performances since 2015 and has been making documentary films by using visual anthropology methods. Her strong interest in the creative sector and different cultures took her to pursue art and design studies in Brighton in 2007. As she discovered contemporary art, she turned to theory and completed her undergraduate education in History of Art based on theory at Goldsmiths London University in the department of Visual Culture, and she worked on various exhibition projects. Her desire to concentrate on film and video encouraged her to move to Paris; she completed her second BA degree in documentary directing at ESEC Paris. While having experience in various oral history projects that led her to discover ethnography practice, she has also completed her master's degree in Visual and Media Anthropology at Berlin Freie Universität. Directed "Il l'appelera la légère" (2014), " h" (2017), "Circa" (2017), "Warehouse" (2018), "I Am Fiction (2019) her short film “Ghostly” (2020) was screened in various ethnographic film festivals and conference programs such as the Royal Anthropological Institute, German (Göttingen) Ethnographic, EthnoKino Bern. While she continues to develop and curate audio-visual projects within Lita Production House that she founded in 2015, Buse explores marine literacy in her new research.

Instructors

Born in 1989 in Istanbul, Deniz Tortum's films and media works have screened at numerous festivals including Venice Film Festival, SXSW, IFFR, IDFA, Hot Docs and Dokufest. In 2019, Tortum's feature-length documentary “States of Matter” was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema” by Filmmaker Magazine and had its world premiere at the Bright Future section of the Rotterdam Film Festival in January 2020. The documentary won the Best Documentary award at the Antalya and Istanbul Film Festivals. His most recent short film “Our Ark”, co-directed with Kathryn Hamilton, had its world premiere at IDFA in November 2021 and won the Best Short Film award at the Istanbul Film Festival. Their virtual reality project “Shadowtime” had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August 2023 and continues its festival journey.
Comes to film production after a series of key management positions in the high tech business in Silicon Valley for over 15 years where she specialized in developing international markets focusing on territories included Europe, Japan, Pacific Rim, and Latin America. Juliette Lepoutre has been an expert in different production labs such as Buenos Aires Lab, BrLab Sao Paolo, Rotterdam Lab, Santo Domingo and Berlinale Talents as well as being jury for Cannes Cinefondation Residence. She is a member of the Académie des César and the European Film Academy. In 2007 she cofounded the production company MPM Film where she produced Adrian SITARU, Béla TARR, Julia MURAT, Panos KOUTRAS, Téona GRENADE MGHVDELADZE, Kamal ALJAFARI amongst others. In 2015 she cofounded Still Moving with Pierre Menahem. Their latest productions includes Tiger Stripes by Amanda Nell Eu (Grand Prize Cannes Critics Week 2023 – Representing Malaysia at the Oscars 2024), Rule 34 by Julia Murat (Pardo d’Oro, Locarno 2022), Mediterranean Fever by Maha Haj (Best scenario, Cannes Un Certain Regard 2022 - Representing Palestine at the Oscars 2023), Feathers by Omar El Zohairy (Grand Prize, Cannes Critics Week 2021), The Fever by Maya Da Rin (Best actor, Locarno competition 2019) and Tlamess by Ala Eddine Slim, (Cannes Directors Fortnight 2019). Currently in post-production of Baby by Marcelo Caetano, Amanha by Pedro Pinho, Zafari by Mariana Rondón and Upshot by Maha Haj, and in development of next projects by Maha Haj, Maya Da Rin, Omar El Zohairy, Jonas Trueba and Maira Buhler amongst others.
Samuel Aubin made his first movie in 1996 in Cambodia, a short documentary, La saison des cyclo-pousse. He finished Khuong Mê's Dark Room, his first feature documentary about the Vietnamese filmmaker, after four years of writing, shooting and editing, in 2002. In 2004, he directed Épopée, his first short fiction and discovered the post-soviet world through a first trip in Central Asia where he shot a part of a new movie, Tell Me Another Love Story, an auto-fiction and documentary, finished in 2013. During his many visits to post-soviet countries to support documentary projects for Eurasiadoc program, he wrote his first novel, Le pommier rouge d'Alma-Ata(Turquoise Éditions) and he started to direct and produce Ara Güler, Once Upon A Time Istanbul, a documentary that he finished in 2017. His second novel, Istanbul à jamais was published by Actes Sud in 2020 and was awarded by the Franco-Swiss Lettres frontières prize. Since 2012 he has been tutoring documentary script writing with Eurasiadoc and works with filmmakers from Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan. Since 2019, he has programmed a documentary series at the Lyon National Opera in partnership with the cinema platform tenk.fr. In April 2024, he was a lecturer at Hamilton College, New York, about making documentaries.
Nino Orjonikidze is a Georgian documentary filmmaker, the author of several award-winning documentaries produced with ARTEFACT Production she co-founded 15 years ago. She studied TV Journalism and documentary at Goldsmiths, University of London (MA), and Journalism & Cinema Studies at Tbilisi State University (BA). Nino Orjonikidze has been a film commissioning editor at Chai Khana Media platform for the last 9 years, where she curates short film production in the South Caucasus, alongside mentoring young talents from the region. She is a professor at GIPA, teaching documentary filmmaking at both BA and MA levels, and also tutors internationally, participating in international exchange academic programs or training initiatives. Nino is often a jury member of different international film festivals be it a Tampere Film Festival, Finland, One World Media Awards, UK or CineDoc, Georgia. Nino is a founding member of the Documentary Film Association DOCA-Georgia. “A Tunnel” is her most recent documentary, a co-production with ZDF/ARTE and Ventana Film, premiered at IDFA in 2019. It has won several awards at different film festivals including the Grand Prix at Trento Film Festival.
Mustafa was born in Amasya many years ago and studied Film at Concordia University. Over the years, he worked for !f Istanbul (2011-2018), Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, Kaunas International Film Festival. Currently runs a distribution/production company named Acéphale in Tiohti:áke (Montreal) among other things.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

We only accept online applications. Please read the requirements carefully before completing the application.
Applicants must be Iran, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, or Armenia citizens Applicants must be under 45 years old. Only applications from candidates residing within the European Union since January 2022 are accepted. Participants must be proficient in English and have advanced upper-intermediate or advanced-level knowledge (all the training will be in English). We expect you to have at least one feature-length documentary/fiction/hybrid film. Participants must attend the entire program, successful applicants will be required to sign a memorandum of agreement. The participant's identity will be disclosed according to the participant's agreement. We highly encourage feminine applications. Children are not accepted.
Co-writers and co-directors can apply to the same project, but only one person from the same project can participate in CineCollective. The application form is expected to be filled out collectively. The project owners must decide who the participants will be.
We expect you to have at least 1 feature-length documentary/fiction/hybrid or 3 short films that has participated in an international film festival program.
No, there is no participant fee. CineCollective provides accommodation and transportation (including breakfast and dinner), workshop training, and passes to ticketed events.
CineCollective participant announcements will be on 3rd on Beykoz Kundura’s website and social media accounts. The participants will be contacted before the official announcement.
Yes, you may reapply for the next edition.
You must participate in all programs except optional events/activities.
Yes, you just need to be a citizen of one of the following countries: Iran, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, or Armenia.
No. you must be a citizen of one of the following countries: Iran, Turkey, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, or Armenia.

                       

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