"Thistles of Sazak" selected for "Film Award for Films on Art" section of Temps D'Images Portugal 2010 Festival

"With the film about his performance "Thistles of Sazak", Hakan Akçura even doesn't give us any change to escape - here we are to follow his heavy work for a welcome performance under the hot sun of Turkey, it is tangible."
Rajele JainDirector of the Film Award for Films on Art
Festival Catalogue (pdf)
I am very honored to have my video selected for Temps D'Images Portugal 2010 Festival, Film Award for Films on Art section.

TEMPS D'IMAGES Portugal 2010 FILM AWARD for FILMS ON ART

The transdisciplinary festival TEMPS D'IMAGES enables, produces and presents since seven years artistic works which were created through the mutual exchange of artists of different disciplines such as performer and film maker, visual artist and musician, writer and dancer.

This year for the third time TEMPS D'IMAGES announces the competition of films to win the TEMPS D'IMAGES FILM AWARD for films on art.

Films on art or artists are intrinsincly transdiciplinary art works since the film maker necessarily has to confront his own film art with the art of the artist which he wants to present.

TEMPS D'IMAGES will select and award films on art which show a unique and high quality of traditional as well as contemporary forms of documentaries: from hommage films to film essays to long term observations to historical research upto experimental films who themselves become an art work through their way of filming or editing - TEMPS D'IMAGES will give a chance to all different forms.

There can be portraits of a famous artist in which the film maker had to approach his protagonist by finding ways between high respect and his own idea to the film, there can be films on the sociological/political context in which a specific art or artist arise, or films with the focus on the process of creation, films which reflect the formal problems in showing 3-dimensional art works in film, films about art or art history itself, films on art of other than the film maker's culture...

A rich interplay is established between artist, art work, film-director-as-artist, and viewer when a film on art wants to be more than a mere documentation, recording of an art event.

Thistles of Sazak

A documentary of the art performance

Producer: Open Flux
Director: Hakan Akçura
Music: Dror Feiler
Camera: Hakan Akçura, Dror Feiler, Leyla Ferngren, Gunilla Sköld-Feiler
Edit: Hakan Akçura
41.31 min.
2010
Stockholm, Sweden
Sazak is a mountain village located in Karaburun, Izmir on the Aegean coast of Turkey and is just one of many Greek villages forcibly evacuated in 1922.

The Greek residents of this and surrounding villages, who once grew rosica grapes in their vineyards and produced delicious wines and molasses, were considered together with the Greek army that invaded Izmir. The Greek residents were driven to the sea at the coves around Karaburun, killed and deported and the villages they left behind were plundered, although they actually had the same rights in these lands as those who remained.

Since those times, for 87 years, Sazak remained desolate, solitary and unprotected on the steep slop facing toward the islands of Lesvos and Chios, where there are still stone houses and unique silhouettes.

In August 2009, about 50 citizens from Patras, Greece, came to Karaburun, Izmir in Turkey. They were the grandchildren of those who were forced to leave the lands which they would visit after 87 years as part of the 2nd Karaburun Peninsula Greek-Turkish Friendship Days.

As they were going to the Kucukbahce village for the first dinner to meet with the local people on the evening of August 6, their bus stopped and they got out. They looked at the village of Sazak, or Sazaki as they call it, lying far away in the falling darkness of the evening.

The second dinner would be at the village of Sarpincik on the next day.

I wanted to salute them by making an art performance at the village of Sazak on August 7, i.e. on the same day as that last dinner. I posted the performance announcement on walls in the town and the surrounding villages days before:

Thistles of Sazak

I will try to clear the village of Sazak from thistles, which covers its heavy emptiness like a heartrending veil, from dawn to dusk on the Seventh of August, 2009.
Your participation is welcome at my performance.

Hakan Akçura

For me, trying to clear the covering of thistles at Sazak is a symbolic cleansing meant to open the way for rescuing the village from the lonely, derelict, unprotected state in which it has been left together with its painful past for 87 years. Also to transform it to one of the symbols of Greek-Turkish friendship, which I believe will develop ever more with each passing day.

I asked for permission, in a way, from the earlier owners of each house, who are no longer there, before clearing the thistles.

Yes, my performance was open to participation. I spread my call not only in and around Karaburun, but I also informed all the guests, Greek and Turkish alike, who met at the first dinner. Only two persons came to the performance in addition to my team; a retired philosophy teacher and his daughter from Bergama, who were spending their summer holidays in Kucukbahce.

They shared their water and fruit with me.

I would like to thank them.

Hakan Akçura


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