Sreda, 21.8.2013 ob 20:30, na vrtu revitaliziranega Socialnega centra Rog

Taksim Commune: Gezi Park And The Uprising In Turkey

Brandon Jourdan and Marianne Maeckelbergh

Kratek dokumentarec govori o okupaciji Gezi Parka, njegovi izpraznitvi 15.7.2013 ter protestih, ki so se odvijali po tem. Vključuje intervjuje z mnogimi, ki so v njih sodelovali ter posnetke, ki še niso bili predvajani.

Since the end of May 2013, political unrest has swept across Turkey. In Istanbul, a large part of the central Beyoğlu district became a battle zone for three consecutive weeks with conflicts continuing afterward. So far five people have died and thousands have been injured.

The protests were initially aimed at rescuing Istanbul’s Gezi Park from being demolished as part of a large scale urban renewal project. The police used extreme force during a series of police attacks that began on May 28th 2013 and which came to a dramatic head in the early morning hours of Friday May 31st when police attacked protesters sleeping in the park.

Over the course of a few days, the police attacks grew to shocking proportions. As the images of the heavy-handed policing spread across the world, the protests quickly transformed into a popular uprising against the Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his style of authoritarian rule.

Children of the Riots

Christos Georgiou

Grška mladina premišljuje, na kakšen način so smrt najstnika, ki ga je ubil policist in izgredi, ki so sledili, spremenili njihova življenja.

When Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot dead on December 6, 2008, the idea that a 15-year-old boy could die on a seemingly safe pedestrian street in the middle of Athens on a Saturday night at the hands of a man who as a policeman was supposed to protect children like Alexandros, it was hard to believe. For the generation of Alexandros, the 15-year-old children who took part in the riots that followed his death, the lessons learned were simply: The police are your enemy, politicians are in their overwhelming majority corrupt and your life has no value. Three years later, on July 29, 2011, under the pressure of the financial crisis, the Greek parliament, faithfully following the instructions of the EU and IMF, voted to pass new austerity measures. The social problems that existed in 2008, stemming from corruption and the misuse of power, were still there, but were now compounded by the financial crisis.

We were filming our protagonists taking part in protests outside parliament as the politicians inside were voting "yes" to austerity measures. Teargas filled the air and Amnesty International observers noted countless examples of excessive use of force by the Greek police on the Greek people who had gathered there to make their "no" vote heard. While making this documentary I was inspired to see that despite what our young protagonists have experienced they still hold on to the thin line of fading hope for a better future; they fight for it day by day and keep their humanity, their need to love and to laugh, intact.

Filma sta v angleškem jeziku.