Etiket multilingual

Katti Djisuk Schroeter Last week 45 young filmmakers from all over Europe came to Istanbul, their freshly shot documentary material with them, ready for editing and eventually screening. What made their project called “Istanbul Express” extraordinary was scores of languages spoken in their films shot in 18 different countries which they crossed on board trains. The participants met in three European cities: Tallinn, San Sebastian and Turin. Divided into groups of three filmmakers (director, cinematographer and sound engineer), they made 15 short documentaries within three weeks on their trains to Istanbul and also during the last week in Istanbul. They stopped in a total of 24 cities, in 18 different countries for shooting. Six days before showing their work the film teams arrived in Istanbul; less than one week left for editing the multilingual material they shot. On Friday, October the 15th, they showed to an audience, equally multilingual and multicultural, the results of their three-week journey. In the French Institute they screened the 15 short documentaries. The young participants were from Portugal, Spain, the UK, Scotland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Turkey. The documentary making was supervised by tutors, producers and coordinators who counseled the participants while shooting and editing. Diverse film making approaches Having the theme of multilingualism in common, the films, each about 15 minutes, had very different approaches: Some had a lot of talking heads in them, for example a documentary film about the inventor of the language ‘Slovio’ – an international language put together by elements of all Slavic languages as a counter reaction to the dominance of English. Some others were just observational, the camera only watching their protagonists without asking questions or intervening in an interviewing way. For example, a film about […]