Unutma biçimleri

“The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment,” wrote Marcel Proust in one of his many musings on the act of remembering. In his latest film, Burak Çevik flips both Proust’s and our own common perception of past occurrences on their head by starting from the act of forgetting. The gravitational centre of his free-floating film, which successfully brings together melancholy and philosophy, is the relationship between Nesrin and Erdem, who can’t remember why exactly they broke up. As they comment on images of places and moments important to them, they try to remember their dreams and feelings. However, there are also seemingly unrelated images, as Çevik explores formal analogies to the way we can’t remember, including a sequence of an elephant being fed. Thus, certain cuts do not necessarily add new images, but try instead to subtract one image from another. The couple as well as the filmmaker discover that forgetting can also work as a kind of healing, a way of growing and opening oneself up to new memories. Consequently, the film understands life and cinema as a process of constant corrosion, whereby everything shifts from one state to another, not violently but tenderly. (Patrick Holzapfel)

In the presence of Burak Çevik.

Burak Çevik: TUZDAN KAIDE (2018), AIDIYET (2019), A TOPOGRAPHY OF MEMORY (2019, K), WHILE CURSED BY SPECTERS (2020, K), A WOMAN ESCAPES (2022, KO-REGIE)