Floodplain

Virtual Reality | 2018 | 13'

A search party searches for someone lost in a forest, in turn becoming lost themselves within the arboreal zone. A half-civilian, half-police force group evacuates the village and the forest for construction, and seek in turn the seekers. An old tree releases a slumbering spell, overtaking everyone within its reach.

Floodplain is built upon the world of Yuva, the Biennale College Cinema feature film of 2018.

FLOODPLAIN, which premiered at the VR section of Venice Film Festival in 2018, has been re-imagined as a short film ( see below). We would like to share this film with you, which we think gains new meaning during this time of the pandemic and our lives in quarantine.

Artistic Statement

FLOODPLAIN is set against a man-made environmental crisis and explores our relationships to each other at the end of nature. If we can no longer be what we were, can we really become something new? Can we be a forest, or a stone; can we be a multitude of organisms; can we be nothing? Can we be something that we don’t know
we can be yet?

Writor & Director: Deniz Tortum

Deniz Tortum was born in Istanbul in 1989. His films have screened at many film festivals including Venice Film Festival, Rotterdam, SxSW, Sheffield, True/False and Dokufest. He worked at the MIT Open Documentary Lab focusing on VR research. He curated and produced the new media sections of !f Istanbul and Camden Film Festival. Among his work are the first Turkish film screened at SxSW, ZAYIAT (2013); VR project created with Çağrı Hakan Zaman and Nil Tuzcu, that told the story of Istanbul Pogrom, a government-initiated organized attack on the minorities of Istanbul on September 6-7, 1955, called September 1955 (2016); the documentary If Only There Were Peace (2017),  co-directed with Carmine Grimaldi; FLOODPLAIN (2018) which was inspired by the world portrayed in Emre Yeksan’s Yuva; the roadtrip/music documentary Anatolian Trip (2018) co-directed with Can Eskinazi; and PHASES OF MATTER (2020) which made its world premiere in January at the Rotterdam Film Festival.