As the XXIII. New Directions in Turkish Film Studies Conference, which will be held at Kadir Has University on May 9-11, 2024, approaches, program details are also beginning to emerge. The theme of this year’s conference, “Cinema and Beyond,” is set to include New York University faculty member Marina Hassapopoulou and director Deniz Tortum.
Marina Hassapopoulou
Marina Hassapopoulou is a faculty member in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and previously worked as co-director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Her areas of expertise are new media technologies, transnational cinema, posthumanism, post-cinema, audience studies, and film and media theory/philosophy. In Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press – Electronic Mediations Series, 2024), Marina Hassapopoulou examines non-traditional approaches throughout the history of cinema and offers analyses of projects that consciously involve audiences in their productions. Through an exploration of many radically innovative approaches that have emerged from periods of socio-political crises and historical transitions, she aims to expand the concept of “interactivity” by evaluating interactive cinema studies in both technological and phenomenological terms. Hassapopoulou’s studies in the field of new cinema technologies; He has received awards such as the Innovative Pedagogy Award (2021) and the Cambridge University’s International Research and Collaboration Award for Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power (2020-1). In addition to his publications, he has produced many works through various media. Some of these are: cultural videos for folklore archives, multimedia scholarship and online accessible resources. (Student-focused interactive media archive https://interactivemediaarchive.wordpress.com, online index focusing on the interplay between cinema and media studies and new media technologies https://transformationsconference.net, the first English-language archive on contemporary Greek cinema https://weirdwavearchive.wordpress.com, a site dedicated to creative cinematic experiments with artificial intelligence and informatics tools <ExpressiveAI.net>).
Deniz Tortum
Director Deniz Tortum was born in Istanbul in 1989. His films and media works have been screened at many festivals including the Venice Film Festival, SXSW, IFFR, IDFA, Hot Docs, and Dokufest. In 2019, he was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema” by Filmmaker Magazine. He has worked as a researcher at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, focusing on immersive media in his research. His feature-length documentary “States of Matter” had its world premiere in the Bright Future section of the Rotterdam Film Festival in January 2020 and won the Best Documentary award at the Antalya and Istanbul Film Festivals. His latest short film, “Our Ark,” co-directed with Kathryn Hamilton, had its world premiere at IDFA in November 2021 and won the Best Short Film award at the Istanbul Film Festival. The virtual reality project “Shadowtime” had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August 2023 and continues its festival journey.
TFAYY XXIII Conference was supported by the General Directorate of Cinema of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey.