Private Project

Detached

Gaia, the mythological personification of the mother earth in ancient Greek mythology, finds herself waking up from a long sleep in the 21st century on a normal day in a forest. She starts to walk in the world, and here the whole world is reduced into a walking lane for her. Firstly she directs herself into the woods but the woods turn into crossroads gradually and the forest turns into a metropolitan city where the skyscrapers and factories arise and she starts to lose her mythical features. In this walking journey, animals and plants accompany her, however, they get lost and harmed along the journey as she continues. As she keeps walking, her appearance changes and evolves. She loses her sympathy and compassion towards others. At the end, she turns into a character that is completely different from who she was at the beginning, and gradually dissolves. Film ends with her completely dissolving into the scene and disappearing.

  • Helin Özdemir
    Director
  • Helin Özdemir
    Writer
  • Bilkent COMD
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Short, Student
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    June 1, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    1 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Turkey
  • Country of Filming:
    Turkey
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Black & White and Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - Bilkent University
Director Biography - Helin Özdemir

Helin Özdemir is a 23 year old conceptual artist with a focus upon graphic art and animation. She studied communication design with a graphic design minor in Bilkent University, and before that she began creating art in her early teenage years and studied art in higher education in Turkey and The Netherlands. During her exchange semester in the Netherlands, she exposed herself to the European contemporary art scenery and here her artistic paradigm found its unique voice. She works in multiple media, and often finds intermediality to create art.

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Director Statement

I am a conceptual artist with a focus upon graphic design and animation. The relationship between visual culture, philosophy, and the social challenges of the modern day intrigues me and inspires my art, and as an artist my artistic paradigm centers around activism. I strive for my designs to enhance lives to embrace what pushes the boundaries and challenge conventional thinking. To provoke thought beyond aesthetics, I embrace the design as a tool of dialogue, and I infuse my designs with a sense of wonder and awe that can inspire and uplift. I find inspiration in signature graphics of the post-punk era, combined with minimalist Turkish poetry as an outburst of sentimental anxiety through a feminist mind-frame. Evermore evolving and drawing inspiration from my multicultural upbringing, my artistic focus is to embark on political controversies. While taking my undergraduate degree, I witnessed my artistic paradigm becoming a predominantly conceptualistic and argumentative discourse. Throughout this journey, my art has opened up and owned a political voice reflecting current societal challenges. This visually expanded my artistic vision and deepened my relationship with political imagery. Through generating, collaging and juxtaposing my self portraits, handwritings, print imagery and organic materials, my art unfolds between concepts, spaces, patterns and objects to deconstruct a lot of phenomena to understand the structures. Here, I believe, friction (ruled out by the design of a non-place) leads to debate; it's what leads to insights and, if done well, leads to tolerance. In that sense, I believe design could even be an ideological acte de resistance in the way it is challenging the models that make up more and more of our lives in favour of the rugged, curved, and edged reality they attempt to approach.