OUR ARK
Created By Deniz tortum & Kathryn Hamilton
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.
Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novella “Invention of Morel”, features a device that can perfectly capture life -- at a cost. Anything captured by the device is infinitely replayed as a hologram but destroyed in the real world. In another approach to simulation, Elon Musk has said: “The odds that we are in base reality is one in billions”. He refers to an idea popular amongst technologists and entrepreneurs: the simulation hypothesis, which argues that we live in an artificial simulation rather than in reality. Enthusiasm for this hypothesis may be explained by the nihilism of our current trajectory. This belief offers solace against paralysis: as we bring our world to ecological catastrophe, we terminate only one of infinite “simulations”. At its core Our Ark explores this conflict.
Festival Selection & Screenings
Imagine Science Film Festival, USA 2021
Official Short Competition (World Premiere)
IDFA International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam, the Netherlands 2021
Official Competition for Short Documentary (International Premiere)
BAMPFA Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, USA 2022
Museum of the Moving Image, USA 2022
First Look Selection
True/False Film Festival, USA 2022
Official Selection
Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital, USA 2022
Official Selection
Glasgow Short Film Festival, Scotland 2022
Techno-Fix: By Extension Programme
Vilnius Film Festival Kino pavasaris, Lithuania 2022
Official Short Competition
Go-Short International Short Film Festival Nijmegen, Netherlands 2022
Dutch Competition
41st Istanbul Film Festival, Turkey 2022
Best Short Film Award (Turkish Premiere)
Hot Docs, Canada 2022
Official Short Competition
BAFICI, Argentina 2022
Official Short Competition
Maryland International Film Festival, USA 2022
Official Short Competition
Dokufest, Kosova 2022
Official Short Competition
Academia Film Olomouc, Czech Republic 2022
Official Short Competition
Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Taiwan 2022
Stranger than Documentary Section
FICMEC: The International Environmental Film Festival of the Canary Islands, Spain 2022
Official Short Competition
Seoul Eco Film Festival, South Korea 2022
Documentarist Istanbul, Turkey 2022
Official Short Competition
Aegean Film Festival (with Tampere Film Festival) Greece 2022
Guanajuato International Film Festival, Mexico 2022
Official Short Competition
Mimesis Documentary Festival, USA 2022
Official Short Competition
SINFF| Luontoelokuvafestivaali, Finland 2022
Official Short Competition
Rooftop Films, USA 2022
Bistre reke Festival, Serbia 2022
Best Editing Award
About Creators:
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.
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 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 work has been performed at The Park Avenue Armory, NYC; Bozar, Brussels; Arcola, London. Her work has been reviewed by New York Times, New Yorker, Time Out, Village Voice, American Theater Magazine, Performance Art Journal. She has written about VR ethics for New Inquiry, recently re-published in their ‘Classics’ issue: https://thenewinquiry.com/voyeur-reality/. She holds a B.A from Cambridge University, and an M.F.A from Columbia University, and is a 2019 Yale University Poynter Fellow.