Ghostly is designed to be the artistic interpretation of an academic study that Buse conducted as her Masters research at Freie Universitat Berlin’s Visual and Media Anthropology department. The research explores the patterns in the emplacement of the new wave migration movement; namely, the recent highly-skilled migrants from Istanbul,Turkey to Berlin, Germany. The film examines the challenges of integration in which the participants look into coping strategies and reviewing on self-management in the conditions of a new living environment in Germany. In the research, the structure of this trajectory in place-making stretches from displacement to emplacement; from the confrontations with the language barrier to the sense of solidarity in online and offline milieus. However, Ghostly does not follow a linear structure, but it rather flows as a collection of anonymous and abstracted memories, moments and stories as the visuals purposefully switch between Istanbul and Berlin.
Buse Yildirim
Buse is an emergent cultural entrepreneur and filmmaker based in Istanbul. She is in charge of the artistic management of Kundura Stage and Cinema in Beykoz Kundura, an old shoe factory. In the meantime, she also initiated the oral history and visual archive project of the factory, named Kundura Hafıza. After completing her BA degree in History of Art at the Goldsmiths University of London, she pursued a second degree in documentary filmmaking at ESEC in Paris. Recently she has been exploring in depth the ethnographic practices through an MA degree in Visual and Media Anthropology at Freie Universität in Berlin.