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.

PAST EVENTS

•  10/01/2025: "Industrial Islamism"

  Featuring Professor Utku Balaban, Xavier University
  with Commentator Önder Eren Akgül, KMTS 2024-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow 
  
• 05/21/2025: “Extractivism Across Production and Social Reproduction: Classes of Labour in Rural Turkey” with Coşku Çelik, Kadir Has University.
  • Watch the recording here!
    

 

• 05/07: "The Order of Dispossession: Crisis and the Making of Global Capital in the Late Ottoman Empire" with KMTS Postdoctoral Fellow, Önder Eren Akgül.