The cinematic portrait At All Hours and None emphatically breaks through the silence of author, physicist and human rights activist Aslı Erdoğan, who lives in exile in Berlin. With unyielding resistance she writes to keep from vanishing and losing her own language. As a former political prisoner in Turkey, she knows all too well the mechanisms of autocratic violence and oppression whose aim is to force people to stay silent. The video performance of the film blends text, photographs and archive recordings into a pulsating audio-visual journey through the places and times which have had an impact on Erdoğan’s rootless life.
Inspired by her poetic work Requiem für eine verlorene Stadt, the film mourns the loss of a life, freedom and identity in a country which is increasingly marked by repression, censorship and brutal violence. »The pen is the only tool I have,« she says. For Erdoğan it is the mightiest weapon in the fight against dehumanisation and forced silence. Her identity is shattered, her past mostly out of reach – and nevertheless it is this rift that leads her to grapple with the present. Her disappearing self becomes the throughline that helps her to understand the present and process her past.
The video-performance of the film melts together with reading of her work and creates a space, following the performance, to reflect with Erdoğan on her journey.
Texts from ›Requiem für eine verlorene Stadt‹ by Aslı Erdoğan.The rights to use the German translation by Gerhard Meier are held by Penguin Verlag, Munich, in the Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH.
In Deutsch, Türkçe, Italiano & Français with English surtitles
