Held for the first time this year, Kundura DocLab brought together cinema and theater practice, offering participants the opportunity to carry out collaborative research over the course of a week with a contemporary, interdisciplinary approach. Let’s look back together at how the week went.

MONDAY, MAY 8

Kundura DocLab began with mentors and participants getting to know one another, followed by a tour of Beykoz Kundura. The day’s first event was with the SEİBA International Storytelling Center. In the session, presented by Maral Perk, participants experienced how, while our senses take us on a journey through the outside world, the place we ultimately arrive at is our inner source of imagination.

TUESDAY, MAY 9

On the second day of Kundura DocLab, participants shared their projects at a meeting moderated by one of our jury members, producer Dilek Aydın. This was followed by an artist talk with architect, artist and researcher Yelta Köm and documentary filmmaker, video artist and film curator Beyza Boyacıoğlu. That same day, participants attended an online artist talk by Mexican actor and director Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez and had the chance to hear about his documentary theater experiences through the work of the art collective he founded in 2003, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol. The day ended with a roundtable at which participants opened their practices and ideas up for discussion, taking as their starting point a letter written by Aljoscha Begrich.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 10

We began the third day with a workshop by French journalist, actress and documentary filmmaker Nino Kirtadze. Kirtadze, who also presents and leads the documentary cinema section of Kundura DocLab, shared her experiences in a daylong workshop. In the evening, participants moved on to Kundura Sahne to watch the performance by Brussels-based artists Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere, who came to Türkiye as part of Kundura DocLab: “Pleasant Island”.

THURSDAY, MAY 11 

The first event of the day was a workshop led jointly by Medipol University Visual Communication Design lecturer Kıvılcım Zafer and Beykoz Kundura Director of Culture and Arts S. Buse Yıldırım. Having drawn great interest from audiences the previous evening with their performance “Pleasant Island,” artists Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere, who have been developing their award-winning Mining Trilogy—an interpretation of the past and present of mining—since 2016, shared their experiences in documentary theater through this work. At the end of the day, at Kundura Sinema, “Phases of Matter” was screened for all of us, followed by a talk moderated by Yelta Köm, in which we joined a conversation with the film’s director Deniz Tortum.

FRIDAY, MAY 12

Kundura DocLab was at Postane today. We watched the film selection prepared by Doclisboa, one of the world’s leading documentary film festivals, together with festival director Miguel Ribeiro. We then joined a talk on “Forms of Screening in Documentary Cinema,” which brought together film curators from Lisbon and Istanbul. Altyazı Cinema Magazine writer Aslı Ildır moderated the talk, whose speakers were Beykoz Kundura’s S. Buse Yıldırım, Doclisboa’s Miguel Ribeiro and İstanbul Modern Sinema’s Müge Turan, who discussed the finer points of film programming, drawing on the freshest forms of documentary screening. And the day came to a close with a farewell reception on Postane’s terrace.

SATURDAY, MAY 13

Kundura DocLab’s final day began with an evaluation session joined by our mentors and jury members, and continued with the SEİBA International Storytelling Center’s workshop on Aesthetic Memory. The closing event was a conversation about the impact of the letter from Aljoscha Begrich that had been opened on the second day.

Held from May 8 to 14, 2023, at Beykoz Kundura, Kundura DocLab brought together cinema and theater practice, creating an original and creative platform for the industry while giving directors the chance to carry out collaborative research with a contemporary, interdisciplinary approach.

The jury, made up of producer Dilek Aydın, researcher, academic and curator Gurur Ertem, director and curator S. Buse Yıldırım and architect, artist and researcher Yelta Köm, evaluated 30 projects from 11 countries. The projects of Iran’s Sahand Sarhaddi, Israel’s Bat-Dor Ojalvo, Lebanon’s Niam Itani, Romania’s David Schwartz and Türkiye’s Can Eskinazi, Rıza Efe Reis, Tuğba Baykal and Zinnure Türe were developed and enriched with the guidance of experts in their fields.

This year’s program of Kundura DocLab, which brings together film and theater directors from Türkiye and neighboring countries in Istanbul, was prepared with the guidance of dramaturg Aljoscha Begrich and creative producer Bruni Burres. The program, which included special project and capacity-building workshops for the selected directors, also featured events open to the public at Kundura Sahne and Postane.

We thank everyone who was part of Kundura DocLab.