The Seven Doors

The Seven Doors

A Documentary Film
by Mehmet Mim Kurt

Against the backdrop of the Turkish education system, deteriorated by the urban war and morphed into the object of vain experiments, curious youth are left disillusioned. The Seven Doors is an ethnographic film about seven students, who alongside their teacher, attempt to develop an alternative educational model that encouraged reading, critical thinking, open discussion in a setting where conflicting ideologies are thought of as generative rather than dangerous. The Seven Doors is principally a story about the love of learning and human encounters during times of conflict and war.

The Seven Doors is a local story told from a universal perspective. Instead of foregrounding “our values”, it questions the status quo, and also makes inroads for imagining less cynical alternatives—to prioritize inclusion rather than exclusion, to find desirable paths rather than pointing out wrong paths. The Seven Doors is a metaphor for free thinking.

The main characters are students from Bingöl University in Eastern Turkey, all from distinctly different backgrounds. Their identities are emblematic of Turkey’s diversity. In this space, students who inhabit identities that are conventionally thought of as enemies—including Kurdish, Turkish, Islamists, nationalists, feminists and secularist—made a commitment to engage one another discussing seminal philosophical texts and describing current event from each of their perspectives. No effort is made to hide the differences that divide these characters on ethnical and political grounds, but the film also tells the collective story students yearning to be challenged.

The collective would gather twice a week, readings occurred outside, in nature; they then were followed by discussions on Thursday nights in the living-room of the teacher’s house. Other students and academics sometimes joined the discussion. For students trained to solve multiple-choice questions, it was a feat to read and work through the oftentimes dense theoretical material. Students were frequently not on the same wavelength, triggering comical situations reflected in the film.

The film orbits around two main settings: outside in nature and inside the teacher’s living room. The house starkly contrasts the hierarchy and formality of the university, while students gathering to read outside proves to be a visual and psychological reprieve from the dark, underwhelming yet overbearing settings of the university classrooms. Strolls through the Bingöl countryside are punctuated by readings and deep conversations, where students move, think and discuss freely. The ways in which each of these students experience of liberation forms the crux of the narrative; a poetic visual tale riddled with symbols, metaphors, and rituals such as the legend of the Seven Sleepers, the silence fast or the conference of the birds.

This documentary was made possible by my academic position at Bingöl University. In this respect, as much as an artistic work, The Seven Doors is an attempt to implement critical pedagogy and inspire prudent optimism. The encounters and connections made possible by this alternative educational model, reflect the structural obstacles faced by a generation of disillusioned youth hungry for optimism.