OUR ARK

Our Ark is an essay film on our efforts to create a virtual replica of the real world. We are backing up the planet, creating 3D models of animals, rainforests, cities and people. We are archiving as if ecological collapse could be staved off through some digital Noah’s Ark of beasts and objects.

Deniz Tortum works in film and immersive media. His work has screened internationally, including at the Venice Film Festival, SxSW, IFFR, IDFA, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Hot Docs, True/False and Dokufest. His latest short Our Ark (2021, co-dir Kathryn Hamilton) has premiered at IDFA 2021 and won Best Short Film award at Istanbul Film Festival. His latest feature film Phases of Matter (2020) premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2020 and received the Best Documentary awards at Istanbul and Antalya Film Festivals. He has worked as a researcher at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, where his research focused on immersive media. In 2019, he was featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Kathryn Hamilton is a theater director based in New York and Istanbul. She is the founder of Sister Sylvester, a performance group. Recent productions include “Three Rooms”, a live skype documentary which premiered at Shubbak Festival in London, and has toured Europe and the US, and which critiques technologies promising ‘presence’ and ‘mobility’ in the context of the crisis over refugees; “The Fall” a performance essay at The Public Theater for Under The Radar, currently touring US universities. Other works by Hamilton have been performed at The Park Avenue Armory, NYC; Bozar, Brussels; Arcola, London. Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times, New Yorker, Time Out, Village Voice, American Theater Magazine and Performance Art Journal.

Our Ark (2021), HD video, color, 12 minutes. Courtesy of the artists. 

Part of a film program featuring films about the ecological crisis, colonialism, extractivism, capitalism and the complex relations between them.

Next film: Dark Matter (2020), Viktor Brim

KIRIK’s 2022 programs are supported by SAHA as part of the Sustainability Fund 2021-2022.