Beykoz Kundura‘s spring program, bringing together films and performances from around the world, awaits documentary enthusiasts. While performances by Rimini Protokoll from Germany, masters of documentary theater, and by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué come to Kundura Sahne, recent award-winning examples of documentary cinema will be screened free of charge at Kundura Sinema in May and June.

Kundura DocLab

April 22-27
The second edition of Kundura DocLab, which brings together film and theater directors from Türkiye and neighboring countries in Istanbul, begins on April 22. Kundura DocLab, the project and capacity development platform that Beykoz Kundura has created for documentary film and documentary theater directors, will offer participants the chance to conduct joint research over the course of a week with a contemporary, interdisciplinary approach. The 10 directors selected by a jury of Dilek Aydın, Gurur Ertem, S. Buse Yıldırım and Yelta Köm will develop their projects under the mentorship of experts in their fields. This year, Imam Djabirowich Hasanov from Azerbaijan; Hesam Eslami, Javad Ebrahiminejad and Mahshid Afzali from Iran; Sonja Djekic from Serbia; and Berkay Tunalı, Deniz Yüksel Abalıoğlu, Didem Kris, Etna Ozbek and İdil Akkuş from Türkiye will take part in Kundura DocLab with their new projects. This year’s program of the platform, which will also include screenings open to the public, was prepared with the guidance of dramaturg Aljoscha Begrich and creative film producer Bruni Burres.

‘Something About Georgia’ with Nino Kirtadze

April 23
“Something About Georgia” (2010), the documentary by European Film Academy award-winning, Georgian-born French documentary filmmaker Nino Kirtadze, will be screened free of charge at Kundura Sinema on April 23. Having competed at major documentary film festivals such as IDFA, ZagrebDox and DOK Leipzig and won the SRG SSR Award at Visions du Réel, the film bears witness to a critical and violent year in the Georgian state, from the presidential elections of January 2008 to the chaos with Russia in August. Nino Kirtadze will also attend the screening and answer questions from the audience.

Rabih Mroue in Istanbul

April 24, 26, 27
One of this year’s exciting guests of Kundura DocLab will be the Lebanese theater director, actor, visual artist and playwright Rabih Mroué. Widely discussed for his work in contemporary art, theater and performance, Rabih Mroué will be at Kundura Sahne for the first time in Türkiye with his performances “Riding on a Cloud” and “Make Me Stop Smoking”. “Riding on a Cloud”, to be staged on April 24 and 26, tells the story of Rabih Mroué‘s brother Yasser Mroué, who was wounded in the leg during the Lebanese Civil War and lost his ability to speak, and of the political conflicts in Lebanon. Blending reality with fiction, the performance examines the modern history and painful present of the Middle East, while also raising a jolting awareness of our globalized visual culture, in which war is watched on screens. Rabih Mroué‘s non-academic lecture “Make Me Stop Smoking”, on the other hand, stages a presentation that steps outside the conventions of performance. Taking place free of charge on Saturday, April 27, and followed by a talk with Mroué, the presentation ponders the question: “It may well be possible to rebuild a lost world, but what is the point?”

Free film screenings in May and June

May 5, 12, 19, 26, June 2
The 2024 selection of #DocumentaryFilmSeries, Kundura Sinema‘s film program bringing together creative documentaries from around the world, awaits you at Kundura Sinema on Sundays in May and June. Featuring a total of 6 films from a wide geography stretching from Israel to Georgia and from Latvia to Qatar, the selection brings together films that question universal human experience and personal human memory. The films, screening every Sunday from May 5 to June 2 at Kundura Sinema, include Madeleine Gavin‘s chilling documentary “Beyond Utopia”, in which she speaks with activists and refugees who managed to escape the dictatorship in North Korea, and which was crowned with the Audience Award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival; Hassan Fazili‘s gripping biographical film “Midnight Traveler”, which made major waves internationally in 2019 and won awards at the Sundance, Berlin and Thessaloniki film festivals; “Dancing in Jaffa”, which brings to the screen, with joy and passion, world champion ballroom dancer Pierre Dulaine’s experiences with Jewish and Palestinian Israeli children; and Alon Schwarz‘s DocAviv award-winning documentary “Tantura”, which uncovers an unquestioned dark chapter in Israel’s history.

‘Conference of the Absent’ returns

May 4, 5, 11, 12, 18, 19
“Conference of the Absent”, by the art collective Rimini Protokoll, known for award-winning projects that expand the boundaries of theater through technology, among them “Remote İstanbul”, returns to Kundura Sahne due to popular demand. Staged at the Venice Architecture Biennale as well as in many European capitals such as Brussels, Lisbon, Luxembourg, Madrid, Paris and Rome, the Berlin-based collective’s performance turns the audience into part of a conference discussing anxiety about the climate crisis. At this conference, where the speakers are not physically present in order to reduce their carbon footprint, real people, among them a refugee from the island of Lesbos, an astronaut preparing for a flight into space and a lawyer representing war criminals, will be represented and brought to life by audience members at Kundura Sahne.