Against the Flow

A group of university students chose to make a documentary about HES (hydro-electric stations), one of Turkey’s most hotly debated issues. They wandered through the valleys of the Eastern Black Sea region and filmed locals’ resistance to the building of the dams. The filmmakers saw this struggle as one of the biggest social movement since the 1980s and seek to show that it is too broad-based to be dismissed as ideologically motivated. In fact, local people speak so clearly about the subject that any pre-defined approach is bound to fail. For them, the nature-human relationship is still intact, and they speak of very basic needs – like food, love or water. What we see here is the trauma of local people as they lose the streams, their life support; and the way they roll up their sleeves to make themselves whole again. —!F Istanbul 2012