This short film, The Balcony and Our Dreams, offers a selection of dreams that have been experienced during the corona virus outbreak. Increasingly vivid dreams have been one of the common emotional responses to the pandemic, reportedly compensating for the lack of bodily and social encounters. While the surrealist imagery of dreams have a universal aspect, they are also
highly specific to context/region, reflecting past/present political and cultural issues, desires and traumas. Alongside the dreams, the images reflect the life in a central neighborhood in Izmir, Turkey, during partial lockdown, including new forms of interaction between neighbors through movement and sound, various function of the balconies as semi-public spaces, the refunctioning of masks as an everyday item, emergence of new street vendors such as newspaper sellers, the daily applause actions, the 1st of May demonstrations and police violence. This film is realized for the The Looking Outside project by Altyazı Cinema Magazine’s supplement Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema
Follow this link to access The Balcony And Our Dreams
Aylin Kuryel is an academic working at the Literary and Cultural Analysis department at the University of Amsterdam. She completed her undergraduate education at Bosphorus University and her MA and PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her fields of research are nationalism, image politics, aesthetics/resistance, and politics of emotions. She is the co-editor of Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010), Aesthetics and Resistance in the Age of Global Uprisings (İletişim, 2015), Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences (İletişim, 2017) and Essays on Boredom (İletişim, 2020). She also works as a documentary filmmaker. Among her documentaries are Taboo (2009), Image Acts (2015), Welcome Lenin (2016), Heads and Tails (2018), CemileSezgin (2019), Balcony and Our Dreams (2020).
