gulyabani is a restless spirit. fethiye sessiz, a notorious clairvoyant from izmir, remembers fragments of her survival of violence and abuse. recounting the tumultuous events of her childhood through her diary and letters to her estranged son, gulyabani recalls the emotional landscape during the most violent period of post-republic turkey.
(iffr)
script gürcan keltek, marc van goethem | cinematography gürcan keltek, murat tuncel | editing fazilet onat, gürcan keltek | sound design gürcan keltek, sertaç toksöz | music oscillatorial binnage | screening format dcp | distribution / copy source gürcan keltek
at my studio along serangoon road, singapore i often walk past a hotel called fortuna hotel. it is a nondescript hotel with 60 rooms, catering mainly to indian tourists. i happen to be old enough to know that this hotel is built on the same site where hotel new world once was. the hotel collapsed in 1986 because of a gross engineering miscalculation. on that spot, 33 people died and many others were injured. walking past this building you would hardly know that this happened. i wonder how many other people like me, walk past that space and think about that tragedy. it occurred to me that i held something within: a subjective list of places that i cannot forget because of the tragedies, incidents, accidents that identify them. each of us harbours an inchoate list in our minds. (tan pin pin)
the may 13 riots remain as a national wound that has yet to heal after half a century. with the incident shrouded in taboo and trauma, those who have lost their loved ones in the tragedy have remained voiceless for decades. the ngs were a family of ten living in kampung baru, kuala lumpur in 1969. five of them died in the may 13 riots. due to the unbearable pain, the surviving family members never spoke to each other about the tragedy since the incident. 48 years later, they broke their silence as the director interviewed them individually, slowly piecing together fragments of a buried memory. (freedom film festival)