Archive for 'Staging a COUP – 1999'
Editing and releasing COUP in America
Posted on 31. Dec, 1999 by admin.
I figured that if we were going to spend months in front of computers editing the film, we didn’t need an expensive apartment in New York City to do so. We drove up Interstate 87 until we found something we loved, and we ended up in the small village of Athens, NY, north of Woodstock, [...]
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Brave leaders of the coup that failed
Posted on 02. Feb, 1999 by admin.
Just before we left, we did a shoot with the people who participated in the 1962 failed coup attempt. We had already interviewed the head of TRT Radio, which had been taken over by the military that evening in 1962, and we wanted to talk with the junior officers who tried to overthrow the government. [...]
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A military funeral
Posted on 31. Jan, 1999 by admin.
When we got back to Istanbul, Elif’s grandfather died. He was 86 and could remember in his youth, bowing to the Ottoman Pa?a. He fell down the spiral staircase leading to his apartment, not because he was old, but because that staircase is a deathtrap. He was taken to the military hospital, where he caught [...]
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Redacted
Posted on 15. Jan, 1999 by admin.
I rejoined the crew for the rest of the Ankara shoot. We filmed Suphi Gursoytrak, former member of the National Unity Committee. He sounded generally sad and pessimistic about the future of the country; it was after the bombing of the Ataturk’s Thoughts Society, of which he was a member. We also interviewed Cehan Mumcu, [...]
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Ahmet Taner Kislali’s last interview
Posted on 10. Jan, 1999 by admin.
The cameramen were starting to drive me crazy. At first their goofball routine was cute; although they fried the power supply, it was fun trying to feed them (they didn’t keep Ramazan and generally ordered half of a restaurant’s menu as an appetizer) and watch them immediately spend the money I’d pay them (they’d buy [...]
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Cases of the missing Turks
Posted on 05. Jan, 1999 by admin.
We interviewed the columnist Raif Ertem, who’d also spent time in prison, but for his pen and not for his sword. He told us tales of torture in jail – close encounters with electrified cattle prods; his teeth all being knocked out. We then went to film Eren Keskin, the head of Istanbul’s Human Rights [...]
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Natural born killers
Posted on 02. Jan, 1999 by admin.
The next speaker we filmed was Coskun Kirca, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs. He had a cat, a pug dog, and a tasteful old house. He was extremely gracious, and I was sitting back on the couch eating some lovely food his wife made us when the cannon went off. After peeling my head [...]
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Muhsin Batur, the meditating General
Posted on 18. Dec, 1998 by admin.
On December 18th, we filmed our first interview. The boom microphone immediately died, which meant that we had to rely solely on the lavalier clip mike, which meant that today’s two interview subjects recorded fine but Elif’s questions didn’t. (We weren’t going to use her questions anyway, but in case they answered a particularly telling [...]
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Adventures in Turkish freedom of speech
Posted on 12. Dec, 1998 by admin.
Today Elif and I went to the court of Dilek’s boyfriend Cos, who’s a judge. We got to sit in on one case, involving a guy who sold meat in a different district of Istanbul than he was supposed to; when a cop confiscated his meat and checked it and returned it, the man noticed [...]
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I’m going to be a pimp!
Posted on 11. Dec, 1998 by admin.
As much as I miss the island, living with Elif’s mother has its rewards. Although staying for two nights at my own parents’ house can bring me back to the dynamic of them treating me (and me acting) like I’m 14, Dilek treats me like a Sultan, which I tend to favor. She works from [...]
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