Kahidep monitors, documents, visualizes and making visible women’s rights-defenders’ experiences of oppression and resistance.

Kahidep 2019, State of Emergency

Kahidep 2020, Local Politics

7 Women, 7 Cities, 7 Cameras

Local Politics, On-site Cinema

Women are keeping record of local politics and making cinema where they are. This year at kahidep: Digital Platform of Women’s Rights Defenders, dozens of female filmmakers from 7 cities are meeting, and they are following 7 women who are doing local politics; who are starting to change the world from where they are.

The 2019 theme of kahidep: Women’s Rights-Defenders Digital Platform was State of Emergency and the theme of 2020 is Local Politics, On-site Cinema. In Adana, Ankara, Antalya, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, Izmir and Trabzon, female filmmakers and women who do politics at municipalities, neighborhood administrations, bar associations and rights-oriented organizations; women who start the struggle of changing the world from the front of their own doors are together to document the experience of “local politics, on-site cinema”. Since June, women who are together at DijiMor: Digital Feminist Communication Workshop, searching, trying and sharing are now ready to roll. In 7 cities, women are directing their cameras to the lives and struggles of women that are doing politics in their cities and they are making the cinema of local politics in the days of the pandemic, right where they are.

Although women are represented very little in the policymaking processes; from inside the house to the street, from the market to the bakery, from the workshop to the sets, from school to the factory, they are searching and finding the way to live, to produce, to operate and to change the front of their door, the street, the neighborhood, the city and life, during the pandemic, too.

Local politics, on-site cinema; because from getting together for film to the experience of filming in the pandemic circumstances, from touching -or not being able to touch- each other to locations that we look at from a distance, directing the camera to the inside and outside of each location, to the front of or behind politics, seeing politics and setting up our camera wherever we are, and saying that “we are, no doubt, making history too”, we are rolling for the kahidep oral-visual history project.

We are on the air before 2020 is over.

The Local Politics oral-visual history project of kahidep: Women’s Rights-Defenders Digital Platform, which Filmmor founded in 2019 in order to monitor, visualize, document and circulate the agendas, experiences of women rights defenders’, is done with support from Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Global Fund for Women.