1+8

Director: Angelika Brudniak and Cynthia Madansky
Locations: Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq and Syria
Video ◊ 120 min.

Filmed over three years, 1+8 traces the periphery of Turkey, interrogating the nation’s sense(s) of self by way of relations with its eight bordering neighbors. Structured in eight chapters, each bifurcated, offering interviews and visual portraits of border towns and their residents on adjacent sides of the frontier, circulating westward from Syria to Iraq, Iran, Nakhchivan/Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Bulgaria, and eventually Greece.

The portraits of the unwaveringly militarized border towns are marked by scenes of the quotidian. It is at once a work of assemblage and deconstruction where cultural, religious, economic and political exchange is sometimes fluid and open, or at other borders hostile and entirely closed.

1+8 offers a contemporary rendering of transnational, transborder relations, but which are of course impacted by centuries of geopolitical history, referencing genocide, political marginalization, population transfers, women’s rights, access to resources and failed nationalisms. The film reflects on the dreams, aspirations and disappointments of peripheral subjects and communities in constant opposition to a hegemonic homogenizing Turkish narrative.

Where cross border exchanges do take place they are determined by a variety of historical and contemporary factors. We see the demands of capital and labor, as with the sex workers from Batumi, Georgia who reside in Hopa, Turkey; we see traces of familial and ethnic ties that have been arbitrarily divided, as with Kurdish relations across the border with Syria and Iraq, or the Roma community across the border with Bulgaria; and we see traversals for the sake of an between the citizens straddling the Turkish/Greek delineation.

For all that these nation states, their borders, their border towns, and the lives of their local populations are determined by multiple—at times contradictory—forces, 1+8 is unburdened by preconceived conceits and theses. Rather than a diatribe or an argument, it is a rare political film that resonates with humanism and an openness to listen.