Description:

A screening of the Turkish-German filmmaker Ilker Çatak's Sadakat/Fidelty (2014) and Wo Wir Sind/Where We Are (2013), followed by a conversation with Çatak and Professors Anna Parkinson (German) and Emrah Yildiz (Anthropology/MENA)

Sadakat/Fidelty is a short film set during the 2013 Gezi protests in Istanbul that tells the intersecting stories of a protester, a young married couple, and clashing political ideologies. Sadakat/Fidelty is a story about interpersonal ruptures during troubled times and the longing for safety. 

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/123073474

Wo Wir Sind/Where We Are: Due to her heroin addiction, Christina Semnik has lost custody of her nine-year-old daughter Paula and now finds herself in stationary treatment. When she visits Paula for the first time in her new foster family, Christina is afraid of losing her forever. She convinces the girl to set forth on a journey into the unknown. But eventually, Paula has to make a choice.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/O6TMdt6IJmE

Ilker Çatak was born in Berlin and graduated from high school in Istanbul. He then moved back to Berlin to study film and television. He completed a Master‘s Program in film directing at the Hamburg Media School. His short films are being screened all over the world and have won numerous awards, including the Student Academy Award in Gold. In 2016 he directed his first feature film, an adaptation of the award-winning German novel Once Upon a Time in Indian Country, which will hit movie theatres in the summer of 2017.

Anna Parkinson is Associate Professor in the Department of German, a member of the Critical Theory Cluster, and an affiliate of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern University. She is the author of An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture.

Emrah Yıldız is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East & North African Studies at Northwestern. He is co-editor of the Turkey Page at Jadaliyya and co-editor of the collection "Resistance Everywhere": The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey.

Ilker Çatak's visit to Northwestern is co-sponsored by:

Department of German

Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program (Buffett Institute for Global Studies)

Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Center for Global Culture and Communication

Department of Performance Studies

Department of Radio/Television/Film

Middle East and North African Studies Program