18.04.2025

Interview Image Acts - Aylin Kuryel & Firat Yücel

Aylin Kuryel and Firat Yücel are Amsterdam-based filmmakers. With their collective “Image Acts," the duo brings together the work they have produced both individually and collectively. What unites their work is a focus on the position of dissidents, protesters, and unrepresented voices. With a mixture of media forms, the filmmakers reflect various forms of resistance.  For the 17th edition of GoShort, we highlighted their work by selecting them as Filmmakers in Focus.

J: Under the name of Image Acts, you bring together the work you produced individually and collectively. What is the idea behind this collective?

Aylin: The idea behind the collective is already present in its name: what connects our work is the understanding that images are political. In other words, images not only represent reality but are active agents that shape realities. So, in that sense, images are intricately connected to activism.

J: How would you define activism?

Firat: For us, activism is existence. We come from Turkey and are based in Amsterdam and Istanbul. With this background, we see activism as speaking up, but we also see it as simply existing. Activism is as fundamental as being on the streets of a city. In other words, it is not separate from anything we do in life. It is essential to our political existence.

 And I think that activism should also be regarded as this essence and necessity of existence here in the Netherlands.

J: Why should we in the Netherlands see activism as existential? 

Aylin: Right now, we are experiencing several events in the Netherlands that should trigger our activism, our resistance. We are facing budget cuts in education and healthcare. We are witnessing the rise of right-wing politics and the normalization of ongoing structural racism. If we see activism as something existential and daily, we would be able to challenge these political changes more effectively. 

J: How do you translate this existential idea of activism into your movies? 

Aylin: In our films, we emphasize that activism is not separate from our daily lives. So, we portray the dailiness of activism. We show that activism is part of everything. It is in the small things, the everyday moments, like getting together, writing, or filming. And we try to peel back and unpack everyday life to reveal the social and political codes that are present everywhere. 

Firat: We call this process of unpacking "archiving the present". Archives typically are seen as an inventory of the past. So, they are a means of looking back into past times. However, if you understand the present as an archive, you can do many things with it. For instance, our films are based on sources like CCTV cameras surveilling the squares of Istanbul. We try to imagine sources like these CCTV cameras as archives and give them political resonance. 

J: You already touched upon the idea that daily actions, like writing or filming, have an activist essence to them. How is documentary-making specifically connected to activism?

Aylin: We don’t see documentaries as a medium that merely provides information, facts, or even the truth. Instead, we see documentaries as an exploration of how we come to know what we know. How can we gather information? And why are we unable to gather certain information? Thus, documentaries are a way of questioning what we know and why we know it. And that makes the process of making a documentary already an activist event. On top of that, the distribution of documentaries can be activist: when we circulate a documentary, we are asked to question what is made invisible, what is shown, and why.

So, both the production process and the circulation of documentaries are more than a mere representation of information. Documentaries question our ways of knowing, being, and seeing.

J: How would you evaluate the effectiveness of documentaries as activist acts?

Firat: Documentaries alone cannot change things. It is people who spark change. So, change can only happen through people who organize movements. But documentaries can be companions to those movements, and with our movies, we try to be good companions to movements of resistance. That is also why we screen our films in spaces of activism like encampments, cultural centres, grassroots spaces, and universities. 

J: Will your work continue to be inspired by resistance and people who speak up in the future? This interview was conducted by Jara Majerus and recorded by Emiel Janssen.

Firat: There's no work without resistance. The political happenings that take place outside the frame are, in the end, what shape and form our films. So, we do not believe in any aesthetic imagination without political imagination. Documentary making is bound to politics.

This interview was conducted by Jara Majerus and recorded by Emiel Janssen.