Episode 10: Idil

I’m currently majoring in Political Science, but I have always been interested in cinema. Actually, I’m truly glad to be studying political science because I couldn’t imagine myself studying something else. But after this, I would like to produce. It varies for everyone, you know. For example, some people are better at writing, while others are better at using their hands but for me, it’s visuals. I really love cinema as an art and photography as well. I am passionate about the visual world and I think it has a lot of impact on the world at this moment and that impact seems to be growing. So, I would like to go to a film school after this but it is also important to me to be able to incorporate my knowledge from political science, my background and my expression into visuals. It can be documentaries, short movies or a more visual aspect of journalism. Whichever way, working with visuals is something I see myself doing happily. The joy for me in producing is independent of whether my work would be liked but rather from being able to see my expression in the end result.

In relation to how I define myself, I think that is quite an interesting question because for a long time I defined myself as strong but I recently let myself re-examine those definitions and labels that we put on ourselves. I think this can sometimes restrict us in many ways. I’ve equally observed that with these tags such as weak, strong, beautiful, or smart for example, come expectations, both from you who gives yourself the definition and society which seeks to impose upon you its own standards which pertain to those words. In this light, denial to conform to these definitions and unlearning these tags is liberating and equally a form of protest against the tags and the limitations that come with them

I can’t really attribute who I am today to a single experience because each experience paves the way for the next and it builds upon the other. However, I am here today because firstly I was born into a family that could afford to send me to Europe and I also learned English. I am from Turkey and I was really lucky with my whole family because, they were really open minded and secular while my grandparents for example were more traditionally Muslim, so I got this cosmopolitan and diverse way of life from Istanbul, where I am from. There were people there from practically everywhere and it was this connection between the Middle East and Europe. But generally, I do find it hard to say that this experience was bigger than the other because in the end every experience leads to another.