Abstract
Digitalization has democraticized the cinematic image in two senses: by making filmmaking technology (equipment, etc.) accessible to people living in the periphery and outside the film industry, and by creating an affordable infrastructure (social media, etc.) for the distribution and screening of films made independently with low budgets. This paper focuses on Ali Kemal Çınar, an independent Kurdish filmmaker from Diyarbakır, Turkey, who makes a resourceful use of digital technologies to make his low-budget Kurdish speaking films and to share them with viewers nationally and globally. My argument is that Çınar’s work pushes through digital democraticization, opening a path towards the cinematic decolonization of Kurdishness in Turkey, a context culturally and politically dominated by Turkishness. Çınar creates an autonomous zone and develops a decolonizing aesthetics through his cinema. This paper refers to theories of decolonization and debates on how emerging digital technologies affect cinema and its postcolonial politics, to analyze the films of Kurdish filmmaker Ali Kemal Çınar from a multidisciplinary methodological perspective. I analyze Çınar’s films, explore his Youtube account, and draw upon an interview I conducted with him on his cinema, to discuss the potentials of digital technologies to help develop an aesthetic of decolonization in contemporary cinema.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—From Democratic Aesthetics to Digital Culture
KEYWORDS
Digital Technologies, Cinematic Image, Decolonization, Low-budget Filmmaking
