Accented Essays: Documentary as Artistic Practice in Contemporary Audiovisual Works from Turkey

This article looks at the use of documentary filmmaking in contemporary artistic practices in Turkey, specifically focusing on three works that adopt a first-person, subjective viewpoint: Didem Pekün’s Of Dice and Men (2016), Şener Özmen’s How to Tell of Peace to a Living Dove? (2015), and Aykan Safoğlu’s Off-White Tulips (2013). Made by artists in transition, these films tackle themes of belonging and identity through stylistic choices proper to essayistic filmmaking, which allow these works to be regarded as accented essays. The personal questions raised through the aesthetics they employ become relevant to collective issues of culture, history, and memory, offering an alternative understanding of the social context, which was largely affected by the political events during the period in which they were made.