Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship

In a repressive state, state censorship is often a given. But even more insidious is the self-censorship that emerges in its wake, as this Turkish collage film shows. It is composed of six short documentaries that reveal in various ways how filmmakers, whether consciously or unconsciously, silence themselves, and explores how this can be countered.

The film opens with a question: what do we want to remember about the large-scale protests in Gezi Park in 2013? Protests that were crushed and are now deliberately erased from public discourse in Turkey.

The six contributions range from deadly serious to tongue-in-cheek, tackling a variety of topics—an inventory of “missing films” and why they were never made; graffiti as a protest against a book ban in prison; a mutilated artwork; and a plea to recognize Gezi Park’s gay cruising culture as UNESCO World Heritage. But one central question runs through all the films: how can we keep the hope of those protests alive?