OPEN CALL #6 PROJECT #212
HATAY: SEPTEMBER 2025
HATAY: 12-24 September 2025
This is the fifth film of the Hatay documentary series.
Camera + Director: Imre Azem
Editing: Mesut Ulutaş
WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
The most fertile agricultural lands of Samandağ, olive groves, and mandarin orchards stretch out before us. One side overlooks the sea, the other leans against the slopes leading up to Vakıflı village. The tops of the distant hills are completely covered with TOKİ (Housing Development Administration) buildings. Now, construction machinery has entered the mandarin orchards, here too, to erect multi-story buildings. The landowners are resisting, but the police and gendarmerie are on the side of the companies that disregard law and order. An old woman's cry rises amidst the sounds of the construction machinery: "What is my crime?" In the historical center of Antakya, there are huge empty spaces where 300-year-old stone houses once stood. "If they want to move me to the other side, I will leave Antakya," says a middle-aged man, pointing to the TOKİ buildings at the foot of the mountain.
Since the February 6th earthquakes, İmre Azem has tried to understand and explain what has happened in Hatay in four documentaries over the past two and a half years. Now, in the fifth documentary of this series, we witness lives that have become increasingly difficult in every sense, the new face of the city transformed by TOKİ, and those who still stubbornly fight. We ask ourselves, "Couldn't it have been another way?"