Film by HfG-student selected for Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival

The film "Set off", which was made as the pre-diploma of HfG student Mustafa Emin Büyükcoskun, was selected for the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival.

The festival is the largest film festival for documentary films in Eastern Central Europe and has been held annually in Jihlava (Czech Republic) since 1997. The six-day festival sees itself as an open forum and is framed by discussions with the audience, workshops, panel discussions and professional meetings.

Istanbul-born Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun (1988) is a student of the German University of Art and Design in Karlsruhe. He worked as assistant director for the film, but also worked as a producer and cameraman assistant. As director, he made the short film, Sardunya (2008), and thirteen episodes of the Hanlardan Plazalara (2013) documentary series for Turkish television. Set-Off is his feature film debut.

The city of Kobani lies in Syria on the border of the sphere of influence of the Islamic State, Turkey and the Kurds. Representatives of these three opposing parties battled it out between the years 2014 and 2016 during a war conflict that claimed the lives of many civilians, including thirty-three Turkish citizens who had come there beforehand for various reasons. Conceptualized as a film in their memory, the filmmakers use symbolism to follow their fateful journey as they set off for a city in ruins. The footage is complemented by double exposures of the survivors' faces, who tell of the untimely deaths of their friends and relatives.

“Set Off was an exercise about how and what to tell, after an unmourned disaster; a journey parallel to theirs, daydreaming in the middle of a conflict zone, where landscape deconstructs power regimes.“ (M. E. Büyükcoskun)