Two directors whose films have been censored—Özkan Küçük and Bingöl Elmas— have come together to discuss the violations of freedom of expression targeting independent cinema in recent years, and the damage caused by these violations, focusing on the films “In the Trace of the Poetic Room” and “Rojbash,” both of which have been subject to various forms of intervention.
Both during and after the Kurdish peace initiative process, censorship became an ordinary process of filmmaking for Kurdish documentary movie-makers. Taner Tan wrote about the challange of cenorship faced by recent Kurdish documentaries
We talked with Oktay İnce, a member of the Seyri Sokak Video and Documentary Collective, whose 20-year-old audio-visual archive was prosecuted on the grounds of his social media posts, about his ongoing lawsuits, his actions to take his archive back, his resistance and solidarity
Video activist and documentary filmmaker Oktay Ince was sued for “defamation of the President” and in the third hearing of the lawsuit, the court sentenced him to 1 year 2 months 17 days of prison. The announcement of the verdict was deferred
The director Veysi Altay was sentenced to prison for 1 year and 15 days, while Dicle Anter’s prison sentence of 10 months and 5 days was converted into a fine of TRY 6 thousand in the re-hearing of Nû Jîn documentary lawsuit
The documentaries “Little Black Fishes: Being Children in the Southeast”, and “Rojava, The Revolution by Women” and the project called “1994”, which was not shot, were associated with the crime of “espionage” in the reasoned decision of the Constitutional Court on Kavala
In Turkey, directors of the documentary movie Bakur (North) were sentenced to 4 years and 6 months in prison. This marked one of the harshest penalties imposed so far over the allegation of “disseminating terrorist group propaganda”. Speak Up Platform prepared a timeline of the Bakur trial and the developments surrounding it