KunduraLab is an international project-based development platform tailored for artists who would like to get involved in a creative encounter space where different methodologies, perspectives are interwoven; we experiment with ideas and creative elements. Along with the other labs we are setting off a new platform dedicated to documentarymakers; Kundura DocLab.

Kundura DocLab is an international artistic project development lab in the documentary genre that aims to strengthen the creative research process for makers. Foremost the platform brings theater and film practice together for an investigative process in order to develop artistic collaboration and methodology in non-fiction storytelling.

We believe that there is a strong interconnection between two disciplines and aim to bridge them by exploring similar elements, overlapping innovative aspects in the creative process and in the form of storytelling. We are building such a structure, in which makers can enrich and nourish themselves in joint processes within artistic and creative peer to peer exchange. We begin to inquiry by discovering the essence of storytelling and carry on looking ways around to create new definitions of challenges, approaches by discussions.

What we offer?
Kundura DocLab offers a capacity building program; a one week gathering with inspiring workshops, lectures and international exchange programmes in Istanbul in May, 2023 to generate this creative and collaborative space. we will investigate harmoniously for a cutting edge cross-disciplinary approach and offer an exchange for building up a curious ecosystem in artistic production.

  • Co-production 
    All the participants will gain priority for the production open calls announced by Beykoz Kundura and Lita House of Production once a year.
  • Mentorship 
    All the participants will receive two online mentorship sessions that can be used within a year after the DocLab 2023 week.
  • Residency 
    All the participants will receive one week residency in Beykoz Kundura that can be used within a year.

Who are we working with?
The framework is designed with the consultation of Aljoscha Begrich and Bruni Burres. We will be hosting notable filmmakers, theatermakers and also researchers & anthropologists for workshops and lectures in our lab programme along with many screenings and performances open to the general audience in the first edition of the Kundura DocLab. 

Who can join?
Kundura DocLab is open to every research-based filmmaker and theatermaker who are practicing documentary, keen on improving methodologies in-depth and also looking for self-development as a creative practitioner. DocLab is not limited to local makers in Turkey, it is an international platform that believes the transcultural aspect in the art of documentary is crucial for innovative approaches in shaping the material of reality. We care about selecting the participants who can clearly state their research interests and skills along with a strong aesthetic approach.. We would like our participants to keep a strong openness to self-development and aim to improve their analytical, critical skills in their creative practice. 

Applications are closed, thank you for your interest.

Category:
Documentary Film / Documentary Theater / Project Development

Level:
Intermediate level and above

Dates:

Application: 09/01/2023-22/02/2023
Application Deadline: 22/02/2023 at 6 pm (Istanbul GMT+3)
Public Announcement: 07/03/2023
Workshop: 8th-14th May 2023 (On-Site)
*Successful applicants must attend “Pre-presentation Day” on 19th April 2023 (Online)

Location: 
Beykoz Kundura İstanbul (accommodation and training On-Site)

The applicants can enroll from the following regions;
Balkans / South Caucasus / Middle East

Afghanistan, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, Georgia, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Lebanon, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.

Applicants must be 28 years of age or older. Student films will not be accepted. Participants must be proficient in English, with an advanced Upper-Intermediate or Advanced Level knowledge. Participants must attend the entire programme, successful applicants will be required to sign a memorandum of agreement Artists or directors can apply with their film or performance/theater projects at the early stage of development. They must present an idea to work on throughout the lab for the application.
We expect you to have either at least one feature-length documentary or a medium-length or two short films selected for an international film festival.
Kundura DocLab provides accommodation (all inclusive), workshop training and passes to the ticketed events. The travel expenses must be covered by the participant.
Kundura DocLab aims to create a safe, sustainable and inclusive environment of mutually acknowledging debate, dialogue and exchange in which everyone is treated with respect and equality. We hereby declare that the selection process of the participants and the workshops will not include any form of favoritism, hurtful language, discrimination, abuse, marginalisation and insulting behaviour on the grounds of gender, ethnicity, religion, background, skin colour, religious belief, sexuality, gender identity, socio-economic class, caste, disability or age.
We expect you to have at least one original production performed at a national festival or an international fringe festival.
KunduraLAB does not provide any grant or scholarship. If necessary successful applicants look for a scholarship to cover the travel expenses with their own means.

Kudos 🌟

We offer kudos to the participants upon their full attendance.

Co-production:
All the participants will gain priority for the production open calls announced by Beykoz Kundura and Lita House of Production once a year.

Mentorship:
All the participants will receive two online mentorship sessions that can be used within a year after the DocLab 2023 week.

Residency:
All the participants will receive one week residency in Beykoz Kundura that can be used within a year.* 
*upon availability

TEAM

KunduraLab Founder & Artistic Director: S. Buse Yıldırım
KunduraLab Manager: B. Ada Kıral
KunduraLab Coordinator: İzlem Oktay

BEYKOZ KUNDURA - ARTS AND CULTURE TEAM

Advısors

For over 25 years, Bruni Burres has been a passionate leader with a proven track record developing and executing innovative projects at the intersection of arts, culture and human rights & social justice. She is a visionary strategic fundraiser, team manager, media educator, producer and social media advisor. She is a Senior Consultant for Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, strategizing and deepening its international work with individual artists and organizations. Since 2008 She was a mentor and partner with the Greenhouse Documentary program and is now, along with the founding members of Greenhouse team, a leading partner and tutor for Close-Up, an international co-production initiative for emerging Middle East and North African filmmakers. Burres is an advisor with Doc Society’s Good Pitch, which develops strategic and effective distribution campaigns for extraordinary films and cultural projects that involve philanthropists, corporations, NGOs and individuals. From 1991 to 2008 Bruni was the director of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which she also co-founded. Bruni is the co-writer and associate producer of Beyond My Grandfather Allende, which won best documentary at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, and co-writer and producer of Whose Country? by Mohamed Siam, which had its USA premiere at the 2016 New York Film Festival.
Born 1977 in Belgrad. Studied art history, philosophy and cultural studies in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Mexiko City. Since more than 10 years of ongoing collaboration with Rimini Protokoll beginning in 2010, most recently "Remote X" with Stefan Kaegi, which was subsequently staged in over 50 cities. Since then, he has been working continuously with Rimini Protokoll. From 2014, he has been a dramaturge at the Gorki Theater Berlin, where he has realised documentary projects with Ersan Mondtag, Marta Gornicka, Oliver Frljic and Lola Arias. He has realised numerous projects in public space in Santiago de Chile, Tehran and Copenhagen, among others, and has been a curator and dramaturge at the Ruhrtriennale between 2020 and 2023, where he worked with Mapa Teatro, Mariano Pensotti and Marco Layera. In 2020 he founded the festival OSTEN in Bitterfeld, which deals the question of being from and living in a postsocialist society in visual and performative ways.

Jury

Filmmaker and producer Dilek Aydın finished Film Studies in Bogazici University and had her master’s degree in Film and Television at Istanbul Bilgi University. She attended Karlsruhe University of Arts and studied Media Art. Returning to Turkey, she started working mainly in production, while developing and creating her own shorts. In 2017, she founded Istanbul-based Heimatlos Films, a production company that already produced acclaimed films such as feature documentary Mimaroglu (2020) a Visions du Reel contender; feature fiction Ghosts (2020) the winner of Venice Critics’ Week, and Blue ID (2022) IDFA Audience Award winner. She is currently producing feature fiction "I'm Here, I'm Fine".
Dr. Ilgaz Gurur Ertem works internationally as a researcher, artistic director, and curator. She focuses on the sociology of the arts and the bodily and aesthetic enunciations of the "political." Her interdisciplinary research crosses the fields of sociology, social and political theory, and performance studies. Besides teaching engagements at the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts (Department of Dance) and Boğaziçi University (Department of Sociology), Ertem is a somatic education practitioner. She was a Humanities Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude and a Fellow of the Hannah Arendt Seminar at The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. Recently, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Free University, Berlin. Ertem has served as a jury member for the German Dance Platform 2020 and curated the iDANS Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance in Istanbul between 2006-2014. She is currently the director of Bimeras Berlin gGmbH, a not-for-profit initiative for inquiry across the arts, social sciences, and humanities. Her recent publications include: "Promises and Pitfalls of 'Political' Curating in Live Arts" (On Curating, Ocak 2023), “Covid-19 Protests and the Performative Force of Untruth: Some Arendtian Intimations” (Performance Research Journal, 2022); “The Object of My Inquiry” (Curating Dramaturgies, eds. Peter Eckersall and Bertie Friedman, Routledge, 2021).
Yelta Köm is an architect, artist, and researcher who incorporated architecture, artistic and spatial practices, to discuss social and political issues. His work is mainly influenced by the perception of the environment, the image of the city, neoliberal transformations, the tension between nature and technology, and collective movements. Landforms, technology, critical spatial and communing practices, urban and data surveillance methodologies, architectural technology, mapping systems, literal and cinematographic storytelling as well as questioning representation techniques are core components of his practice. He was the associate curator of the Vardiya exhibition at the Pavilion of Turkey at Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018 and curated the Caution! Slippery Ground exhibition at Istanbul Modern Museum in 2016. He collaborated actively with Studio Tomàs Saraceno and Aerocene Foundation between 2015-2019. He is co-founder of Herkes Icin Mimarlik [Architecture for All] and a member of Arazi Collective. Recently, he assumed the exhibition design of Füsun Onur’s Once Upon a time… exhibited during 59th Venice Biennale. Köm is currently workings as a research associate at the chair of Practices and Politics of Representtation at Bauhaus University Weimar and a researcher at the Topological Atlas project hosted by TU Delft.
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.

Key Dates 

  • 09/01 Monday DocLab Open Call Applications Begin
  • 22/02 Monday 6 pm (Istanbul GMT+3) DocLab Applications Deadline (Applications have been extended until February 22nd. This date is strictly the application deadline.) 
  • 07/03 Monday DocLab Participant Announcement to Public 
  • 19/04 Wednesday “Pre-presentation Day”
  • 08-14/05 2023 DocLab Programme (On-Site in Istanbul) 

Kundura Cinema Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Moon Landing

Kundura Sinema'dan Ay'a Yolculuk

Kundura Sinema'da Wim Wenders Seçkisi