More on "I don't want to call it home"
Through conversations with loved ones, a young Turkish artist confronts her fears regarding her country’s future, and the dilemma of staying or leaving home behind.
Watch the trailer
About the film
"Dear Léa." This is the first sentence of the film because the project itself came to life as a result of conversations between two friends.
This film came from a place of genuine frustration with my home country.
After I returned home from my studies abroad, my documentary filmmaker friend Léa (Luiz de Oliveira, the co-director) and I, over Skype, talked about the situation in Turkey. She saw me at my lowest after the military coup attempt on July 15, 2016, which was a terrifying, unsettling, unexpected experience for everyone.
Léa asked me whether I'd like to make a film about it with her. She had seen my then-amateur drawings on Instagram and was intrigued by the universe I was beginning to create with my art. So she encouraged me to try out animation. I had no previous filmmaking or animation experience, and no industry-standard tools to work with. But I had a story to tell, so I accepted. It was the best, one of the most life-changing decisions of my life.
Léa and I are still close friends and successful collaborators who listen to and understand each other. This was our first collaboration; it was also my first animation, and my first film. It's autobiographical in the sense that it touches on the issues that every young woman (or young person in general) in living in Turkey experiences one way or another. I wanted it to be out there, as a heartfelt, even naive eyewitness project to one of the most tumultuous times in Turkish political history. And even a heartbroken love letter to the country I still choose to live in.
About the technique
I don't want to call it home features handmade animated characters over footage of Istanbul.
First drawn and coloured with ink and felt-tip pens on transparent sketching paper, each character was then scanned and transferred to the computer, and inserted on the live-action footage frame-by-frame.
The whole animation process took about 3 months of hard work where I never once left my desk.
Below you can find the photo of some discarded, uncolored frames I put over the roses in our Aegean garden (where I did most of the work) in some sort of absurd installation... Clearly, the constant work had been taking its toll!
