THE GHOST ON BOARD / GEMIDEKI HAYALET

This film program, centering around the 2019 book titled The Ghost on Board: The Construction of Kurdishness and Turkishness in Turkish Cinema, will trace the Kurdish issue in Turkish cinema from the 2000s to the present and the forms in which Kurdishness and Turkishness are represented in relation to it. How do the representation practices and methods of these films differ from previous periods? How are conventions and representations of, and discourses about, Turkishness and Kurdishness constructed in relation to the Kurdish issue? With which emotions and ideas were the films conceived and fictionalized? The Ghost on Board is a program consisting of eight films and aims to critically discuss the construction of Turkish and Kurdish identities around these critical questions.

Funded by Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa and the Projektfonds Urbane Praxis and is part of Draussenstadt

Sebahattin Şen studied Media at Akdeniz University (BA) and Sociology at Muğla University (MA) before receiving his PhD degree from Dep. of Sociology, Istanbul Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in 2016. His articles have been published in various journals such as Cogito, Kültür ve İletişim, Teorik Bakış and Dipnot. In 2017 he was expelled from Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, where he used to work as a research associate, because he signed the petition “Academics for Peace”. In 2019 his book The Ghost on Board: The Construction of Kurdishness and Turkishness in Turkish Cinema was published by Metis Publishing.