Remake, Remix, Ripoff

SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA's selection:

Berlin is home to a large German-Turkish community which is today an integral part of the city’s cultural life. A vast range of films produced within the Turkish film industry (Yeşilçam), including comedies, action films and melodramas, proved to be highly popular within this community. Screened in movie theaters and played on VHS players at home, Yeşilçam shaped migrant film culture in Germany as well as a generation of renowned German filmmakers. Despite its crucial role in the cultural and social life of the migrant community from Turkey, the phenomenon is often neglected and almost completely absent in cultural discourse. Cem Kaya dedicates his documentary to this highly productive film industry, the strong bond it shares with audiences and the creative strategies it used to bypass copyright issues. Remake, Remix, Ripoff has always been a film that inspired us and fits perfectly to the transnational approach that we take to our work at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA. 

– Malve Lippmann & Can Sungu of SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA

How can a new kind of cinema be collectively created within a transnational society? SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, the cinema-experiment by bi’bak, explores cinema as a space of social discourse, exchange, and solidarity. The curated film series brings together diverse social communities and connects places both near and geographically distant; it links pasts, presents and futures and moves away from a eurocentric gaze towards transnational, (post-)migrant and postcolonial perspectives. SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA is a different kind of cinema, one simultaneously committed to local and international communities, that understands cinema as an important public sphere of sociality; it considers film history as crucial to the work of cultural memory and is committed to a diversity of film culture and film art. In Haus der Statistik at Berlin-Alexanderplatz, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA builds a bridge between urban practice and film to create a space that opens access, stimulates discussion, educates, moves, provokes and encourages.