Didem Pekün
Araf
The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In very slow motion, he soars through the air like a bird in a graceful dive. We never see him land. The essayistic road movie is the diary of a ghostly character, Nayia, who travels between Srebrenica, Sarajevo, and Mostar in Bosnia. She has been in exile since the war and returns for the 22nd memorial of the Srebrenica genocide. Narrated through the interweaving of diary notes and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, the film speaks of home and exile, memory and the land. Nayia reads the story of Icarus not as one of failure, but of ambition to see the other side of exile, as the film embraces the paradoxes of the poetry of the land with the logistical static of the post-war condition.