Acabou o Amor/Love Is Over/Aşk Bitti

Acabou o Amor is named after a slogan chanted during Brazil’s uprisings in 2013: ‘Love is over! This is Turkey now!’ After participating in the Gezi uprising, Mert Kaya travels to Brazil in pursuit of questions raised during his own experiences. On the 10th anniversary of Gezi, we come together to contemplate two parallel uprisings in Turkey and Brazil, while stopping by other struggles; from Tunisia to Egypt, Spain to Greece, these are places joined in solidarity against neoliberal politics, each rising up to claim their ‘right to the city’.

Mert Kaya is a documentary filmmaker and video artist based in Istanbul. His interest in cinema derives from the motivation to discuss social issues with a visual medium. His debut film Acabou o Amor (2017) was screened in various film festivals. He collaborated as a video artist in the project Side by Side exhibited in the Venice Biennale 2021. He is currently working on a documentary about Anadolu Kültür and its 20 years of resilient actions in civil society in Turkey.

Begüm Özden Fırat is Professor in the Department of Sociology in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey. She works in the fields of visual culture, urban sociology, and social movements studies. She is the co-editor of Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009), Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, Possibilities (Rodopi, 2011) and Aesthetics and Resistance in the age of Global Uprisings (İletişim, 2015).

Senem Aytaç is a film critic and curator. She has been a core member of the independent Turkish film magazine Altyazı from 2004. In 2019, she co-founded Altyazı Cinema Association, which mainly focuses on censorship and freedom of artistic expression in Turkey. She is now based in Berlin.