Storytellers Speak is a series presented by A-BitterSweet-Life through which filmmakers from all over the world share their experiences and insights into the art of cinema. Artist and filmmaker Sefa Sungur gives a personal and insightful view on why one makes films and what it means to make films in connection to the unique language of the medium. He has recently been accepted to the Béla Tarr founded Sarajevo Film Academy, also known as film.factory, where the likes of Tilda Swinton, Gus Van Sant, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jonathan Rosenbaum are faculty members. Every year known artists visit for two weeks of workshops, names like Juliette Binoche, Gael Garcia Bernal, James Benning, Agniezka Holland, Zeki Demirkubuz, Christian Mungiu, Pedro Costa, Alin Tasciyan, this season Jacques Rancière and probably Alejandro González Iñárritu. As Sungur states, My primary goal is to make sincere films. This school is for me one of the biggest steps I could ever make towards that goal. Let’s nourish and further a cinema of sincerity. Learn more about how you can help filmmaker Sefa Sungur with Tuition Fee for Tarr’s Film School and visit sefasungur.tumblr.com.

Michael Haneke gives a nice answer to the question “Why do you make films?” He says: “Never ask the centipede why it walks or it will stumble.” I see things in a similar way. The “why” is hard to answer but I can talk about what interests me in the medium. The ability to capture time and sculpture it as Tarkovsky said is one of those things. Then there is a certain sensation, a feeling that a film evokes. That’s what I’m after. Let’s take Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. If we want to impose a genre on it, we can say it’s a mystery/crime-fiction maybe. It’s based on a simple detective fiction narrative. But is this film, a detective story? It’s obviously a film that uses its narration to create an atmosphere, an understanding of time that evokes a unique feeling. Of course the word sensation or feeling isn’t fully representing the idea that I’m talking about. That humane “thing” is what I’m after now and what I will be after when I make films. This “thing,” not possible to explain by the use of words, that is best described with the Lacanian term “the Real.” It’s something that in my opinion we can only touch through artistic efforts. I’m interested in music as well as in literature, but I think my true talent lies in cinema, that’s why I want to make films at the moment. I want to touch “the Real” because otherwise I feel incomplete.



Cinema does also represent hybridity to me. This is also a quality that distinguishes cinema from let’s say music or literature. Cinema is poetry (different from literature) and literature, but it is also photography, it’s also music, also dance, architecture or painting or theatre or even cooking. It includes all of these elements in some way or another, but it’s more than that: it’s a unique form. It is also an adjective. Like poetic we can use the word “cinematic” for certain states or events in life. Let’s take the image. An image is, when symbolized, the foundation of language. Language is a symbolic system. But the image itself is not obliged to signify a concept. Every image is a unique phenomenon. Both aspects seem inspirational to me. The sound is a strong concept on it’s own. It doesn’t simply mean music or atmosphere. It means the motion of substance, different from the image which is the condition of substance. That’s why I think the image relates to the mind but the sound relates to our hearts. It’s a romantic approach of course but it inspires me. I don’t actually see the future, that’s why I also can’t see the future of cinema, and I can’t predict anything based on observations. But I can say something about the quality of cinema today. As Tarkovsky said, cinema hasn’t found its own language yet. Cinema is not happening right now as an art form. We prepare for this form to be art. Now, it’s still too theatrical, too musical, too literary, too lingual, too verbal. But in my opinion, it has the potential to be something like music or poetry, without stealing anything from music or poetry. It will change everything if it survives.

That’s the importance I give to cinema, and I’m still learning and trying.