The Avalanche

(Aşît)

Pinar Öğrenci
Germany, Turkey, 2022

Free for UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty

Get tickets: https://bampfa.org/event/avalanche

Mosse Lecture by Pinar Öğrenci on tracing histories of displacement in constellation

In cooperation with the symposium Media and Migration in a Digital Age

In Conversation

• Pinar Öğrenci
• Deniz Göktürk is a Professor of German and Film at UC Berkeley.
• Minoo Moallemis a Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Director of Media Studies at UC Berkeley.

For her film, presented as an installation at documenta fifteen, Pinar Öğrenci returns to her father’s hometown, Müküs, within the mountainous region in southern Van. On Turkey’s border with Iran, this former capital of the Urartian civilization, and the Armenian Vaspurakan dynasty, today has a dense urban population of mainly Kurdish-speaking communities. The town enjoyed a multilingual education and heritage in Armenian, Kurdish, Farsi, and Arabic until 1915. The Avalanche is inspired by Stefan Zweig’s final novella, The Royal Game (Schachnovelle, 1941)—a psychological thriller in which chess becomes a survival mechanism in the face of fascism.

documenta

FILM DETAILS 

SCREENWRITER

• Pinar Öğrenci

CINEMATOGRAPHER

• Pinar Öğrenci
• Ercan Yılmaz

LANGUAGE

• Kurdish
• with English subtitles

PRINT INFO

• B&W/Color
• Digital
• 60 mins

SOURCE

Pinar Öğrenci