Didem Pekün

Purgatorium is a road movie (shot between 2014–2017) and diary of a ghostly fictional character that moves between Srebrenica, Sarajevo to Mostar. It is guided by her diary notes and merged with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, the name of a diving competition in Mostar. Purgatorium explores an in-between phase in Bosnia and beyond. A moment when everything stands still, which is how I felt when travelling through Bosnia — from Srebrenica to Sarajevo to Mostar — in January 2014. And that is how I feel living in Turkey today and elsewhere. It implies a radical instability and this is the psychogeography that I intend to explore on screen. During my time at CEU whilst I will be completing the final post-production of the film I will also write on ‘unwar filmmaking’ as conceptualised by Alisa Lebow in talking about films which focus on the implications of war, rather than direct representations of it.

Didem Pekün is Affiliated Teaching Fellow in Visual Theory and Practice  in cooperation with the Visual Studies Platform of CEU