In the 90s, when the Serbian government forcibly removed students for opposing the curriculum, the director’s grandfather and other volunteers built new desks, ensuring education in Kosovo.
In November 1995, the leaders of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia & Serbia met in Dayton (Ohio) to broker a peace agreement that would end four violent years of war in Bosnia & Herzegovina. Negotiated at the Hope Hotel located on the grounds of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Dayton Agreement locked Bosnia & Herzegovina into a simulacra of democracy, through the proxy of a site that was a simulacra in itself: a military base on the other side of the world, an intimidation to the signing parties.
Brainless Rabbits live in Rabbitland, a territory advertised as a seemingly perfect world that bears an unsettling resemblance to the landscapes of war zones, ghettos and slums. Their everyday life seems completely ordered and fulfilled. However, the Rabbits spend their days voting again and again, participating in a simulacrum of an electoral process that takes place once a day. Is this an exemplary free and democratic society or the worst of dystopias painted in vivid shades of pink?
Letters from Silivri draws on letters of the Turkish philanthropist and public intellectual Osman Kavala to document a timeline of his imprisonment. By separating voice and image, the film intends to create an echo chamber that allows audiences to listen more carefully to Kavalas letters, while at the same time placing his words in context of the civil society.
The director and his father take the road to retrace the latter's exile as a 19-year-old refugee from Kosovo in 1968.