Trailer:
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/865375059/f7396df28a
Original Title / English Title: Suyun Üstü / Afloat
Country, year, length: Turkiye, 2023, 115 mins
Language / subtitles: Turkish and English with Subtitles
Screening format: DCP
Director: Aslıhan Ünaldı
Script: Aslıhan Ünaldı
Producer/s: Kamen Velkovsky, Aslıhan Ünaldı Camera: André Jäger
Music: Davut Özdemir, Deniz Güngör
Cast: Nihan Aker (Zeynep), Elit İşcan (Yasemin), Serhat Ünaldı (Yusuf) , Lila Gürmen (Alev), Eren Çiğdem (Ali) , Oscar Pearce (Stephen)
Social media: https://www.instagram.com/afloatthefilm/
Trailer https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/865375059/f7396df28a
Logline: When two sisters embark on a sailing trip along the serene Aegean coast with their fractured family, simmering resentments and buried secrets rise to the surface, threatening to shatter their fragile bonds with each other and their homeland.
Short Synopsis
Zeynep returns home to Turkey to reunite with her divorced parents and estranged younger sister. The family embarks on a sailing trip, a last chance for her father Yusuf, a dissident journalist sentenced to prison, to reconnect with his daughters. Once contained on the small boat, tensions rise, and when a young local man disrupts the delicate family dynamics the trip takes an unexpected turn.
Afloat, which premiered at the São Paulo International Film Festival in October 2023 and has since been screened at prestigious festivals including Valencia, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Sofia, Istanbul, New York Cinefest.
Speakers
Aslıhan Ünaldı
Aslihan Unaldi is a filmmaker born and raised in Istanbul, now based in Brooklyn. She graduated from the German Gymnasium in Istanbul and later pursued studies in photography and international relations at Yale University in the United States.
Aslihan’s work, whether as a writer, director, or both, has been shown at numerous prestigious international festivals, including Rotterdam, Sundance, Berlinale, São Paulo, San Francisco, Mar del Plata, and Istanbul. Her projects have received grants and garnered support from prominent organizations such as the Tribeca Film Institute, the Sloan Foundation, Netflix, Topic, Film Independent, and New York Women in Film and TV. She has also been selected as a “Young Society Leader” by the American-Turkish Society in New York. In addition to her career as a filmmaker, Aslihan teaches screenwriting in the graduate film programs at Columbia University and NYU’s Tisch School of Arts, where she herself earned her Master of Fine Arts.
Merve Emre
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She earned a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (Cambridge: MIT, 2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Norton, 2021). She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press) and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits (Norton US / Harper Collins UK).
She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books to New Literary History, PMLA, American Literature, American Literary History, and Modernism/modernity. In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Quebec, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She has judged the International Booker Prize, the Story Prize, and other major awards and grants. She currently serves on the boards of the Hawthornden Foundation and Connecticut Humanities.
Evren Savcı
Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, DUP) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her second book project turns to the political economy of monogamy. In it, she discusses the establishment of it as a central tenet of civilized sexual morality, and attends to the current neoliberal incorporation of its alternatives and restoration of it distributive logic. Savcı’s work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory & Event, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, GLQ, and New Perspectives on Turkey, and in several edited collections. Savcı received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Southern California, and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Sociology from University of Virginia. Following her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral fellow at The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN).