“Kundura Sinema opened its doors in the fall of 2018 as one of the first steps in shaping the arts and culture identity of Beykoz Kundura, a site of industrial cultural heritage. This process, which grew further with the opening of Kundura Sahne, was in fact designed with inspiration from the Kundura Hafıza project. In the summer of 2017, on the terrace of Yeni Kundura, one of the former production buildings, we announced for the first time both the memory project and news of our cinema, then still under construction, as part of the Restored Film Days, and shared our first glimpses of them. In the memory project, we used the oral history method to refresh, and in a sense restore, the memories of both the former factory workers and ourselves. We took our first steps by watching restored films about workers and factories in a restored factory. Restoration was in fact a process of finding new life; in being renewed, it made new encounters possible across different layers of time. We offer new generations different materials and different stories, introduce them to the concept of cultural heritage, and, as they rediscover the past, remind them that the present is history too. At Kundura Sinema, we have always screened restored classics in our special curations with the utmost care. By screening Hollywood classics, by presenting restored silent film works with live music, and by moving away from a Western-centric perspective, we have brought restored prints of important works of African and Far Eastern cinema to film lovers.

Every year, Kundura Sinema opens its arts and culture season with carefully crafted curations of newly restored films shown in the classics sections of that year’s major festivals, bringing Istanbul’s film lovers together with these classics on the big screen for the first time. The cinema itself opened with “The Naked City”, Jules Dassin’s 1948 film noir, which was likewise part of the Venice Film Festival’s classics selection. By creating a new cinema destination at an entirely different end of the city, Kundura used that year’s selection to invite audiences to rethink both themselves and cinema’s direct relationship with cities.

Featuring many other restored classic films in its program throughout the year, Kundura Sinema once again opened the 2019 season with restored films chosen from the Venice Film Festival’s classics selection. While bringing many Hollywood classics into its program, it also made sure to screen a work by one of the most important directors of Hungarian New Wave cinema, Istvan Gaal’s “Sodrasban”, on the big screen. The timing of the season’s start was, of course, no coincidence… With a nod to October 27, UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, Kundura aims to help build awareness of cultural heritage in cinema and visual media.

October 27, UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is marked each year around a particular theme, with conferences and film screenings organized by leading national film and media archives. Film restorers share information and ideas, including many technical matters concerning that year’s discoveries and the condition of the works they have been working on. By screening the films restored that year and starting dialogues on audiovisual heritage within their own institutions and among institutions at the national and international level, they develop institutional relationships. Audiovisual documents, from film, radio and television programs to many other kinds of records, are among the legacies that bring us together on common ground. They take their place in archives as primary records of every detail of life in the 20th and 21st centuries. October 27 is designed not only to raise public awareness of the need to preserve these archives, but also to question their accessibility, to invite people to discover visual archives at risk of disappearing, and to draw the attention of the press to issues concerning cultural heritage.

The theme set by UNESCO for this year is “Your Window to the World”. Audiovisual materials are, in fact, much like a window to the world: we cannot take part in the events we observe, but we can watch them; we hear voices from the past, but they can never speak again. We carefully craft stories to entertain and to inform. As we search for ways to understand the world and seek to connect with people from other cultures, audiovisual content plays an important role in our lives.

During the pandemic, as we redefined our relationship with the outside world while quarantined in our homes, the windows of our homes became a breath of fresh air and a new way of seeing for all of us. This year, under the theme of a window to the world, Kundura Sinema invites you, in collaboration with Eye Film, the National Film Archive of the Netherlands, to rediscover Europe’s first moving images, its very first recorded films, through the “The Brilliant Biograph” selection. Accompanied by the music of Dutch musician Daan van den Hurk, we lose ourselves, from our own window, in documentary footage shot between 1897 and 1902 and in the everyday life of Europe at that time.”

S. Buse YILDIRIM
Director of Arts and Culture, Beykoz Kundura