Description:

Join the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program for a screening of the documentary Dargeçit (Hold Still) followed by a discussion with director Berke Baş on Thursday, January 29th at 12pm in Kresge 1515. This is the first documentary screening in the series “Witness, Archive, Evidence: Documentary Cinema and the Politics of Memory in Turkey." Lunch will be served! 

Hold Still (Dargeçit): Documenting Enforced Disappearance, Confronting the State

Dargeçit (Hold Still) follows the court proceedings of the Dargeçit JİTEM Trial: an extraordinary legal struggle born from the determination of the families of seven people who were forcibly disappeared in 1995 in the Dargeçit district of Mardin. After years of insistence, alongside their lawyer Erdal Kuzu and the Human Rights Association (İHD), this fight finally made its way into the courtroom in 2015. Directed by Berke Baş and produced by Enis Köstepen, the film was shot between 2018 and 2022 and focuses on the case’s final five years; at a time when many trials concerning the grave human rights violations of the 1990s face the looming threat of being dropped due to statutes of limitations.

More than a record of hearings, Dargeçit is a witness to endurance: a 27-year-long pursuit of truth and justice within the judicial landscape of present-day Turkey. For each session, the families travel for hours, returning again and again to the same questions, the same silences, the same walls, refusing to let disappearance become closure. In a country where impunity is often treated as an unshakable armor, the film insists on another reality: that “for those who want to see, the truth is plain to see.” 

The film’s impact has also been recognized across major festivals and awards. In 2024, it received Best Documentary at the 43rd Istanbul Film Festival, and won Best Editing and Best Cinematography at the 17th Documentarist Istanbul Documentary Days. In 2025, it was named Best Documentary at the 57th SİYAD Turkish Cinema Awards, received the Orhan Doğan Justice and Truth Award at the 9th FilmAmed Documentary Film Festival, and won the Mehmet Aksoy Best Feature Documentary Award at the London Kurdish Film Festival.

Link to the documantary trialer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37-t943D15s 

About Berke Baş:

Berke Baş is a director and cinematographer, known for Dargeçit (2024), Bağlar (2016), and Transit (2005). She earned a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University and an MA in Media Studies from The New School in New York City. She has been directing and producing independent documentaries since 2001. In 1998, she co-founded inHouse Projects with Melis Birder. Between 2002 and 2017, she lectured in Istanbul Bilgi University’s graduate programs in Cinema, Television, and Cultural Studies.

Documentary Series: “Witness, Archive, Evidence: Documentary Cinema and the Politics of Memory in Turkey”

Witness, Archive, Evidence: Documentary Cinema and the Politics of Memory in Turkey is a screening-and-conversation series that brings together four documentaries tracing how violence, inequality, and displacement are lived, and contested, through institutions and everyday life. Moving across courtrooms and case files, borderlands and militarized landscapes, boarding schools and assimilationist discipline, and post-earthquake precarity and minority survival, these films ask what counts as evidence when harm is denied, normalized, or bureaucratically managed. Centering testimony, archival traces, and embodied memory, the series explores documentary cinema as a mode of public witnessing: one that not only records aftermaths of state power, but also illuminates the ongoing struggles for rights, recognition, and justice. Each screening is followed by a conversation with the directors.