Mario Rizzi

Excerpt from Kazın Ayağı (2012), 4 mins 56 secs

63 min 30 sec

HDCAM film

Produced by Tansa Mermerci Ekşioğlu and Mario Rizzi

Courtesy Mario Rizzi

The film is based on the homonymous original play, written by Mario Rizzi in 2011, and is about the making of the play. The screenplay is structured around a new Karagöz Turkish shadow theatre script and is inspired by histories and memories of displaced people living in Istanbul neighbourhoods – namely Ayvansaray, Balat, Fener and Tarlabaşı – going through top-down urban transformations.

In the first phase of the project, these personal narratives were recorded with the aim of voicing less noticed situations of social distress, with the language and the idioms used by the protagonists. This process allowed a deeper insight into the population dynamics of these neighbourhoods and the ways in which displacement affects the lives of single individuals, the urban texture and the interrelationship between gender, ethnicity, and class.

Karagöz theatre – through the conflictual dynamics and the equilibrated coexistence between the two main characters, Karagöz and Hacivat, two different ways of common sense – was chosen because it allowed for elaboration on the notions of power, authority and submission, based on the humorous possibilities of rudimentary situations, characters, and costumes.

Turkish shadow theatre was explored as a popular form of culture and as a platform that has historically enacted the political potentiality of performativity. It was adapted with a series of visual and textual registers including film, the classical text of Plato and the allegory of the cave, Kurdish dance, and original rap music.