Doors & Music 6:00p
Program 7:00p

Offsite
Maria Hernandez Park
Handball Court
Brooklyn, NY 11237

We’re thrilled to join Airtime to present an evening of outdoor music and film in Maria Hernandez Park, where we’ll screen Fatih Akin’s cult documentary, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, newly restored in 4K by MUBI.

Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul follows Alexander Hacke, a member of the German experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten, as he explores the city’s eclectic music scene. Hacke travels through Istanbul, capturing performances by a variety of artists who represent the city’s unique fusion of Eastern and Western musical traditions. The documentary features a wide array of genres, including traditional Turkish music, rock, hip-hop, and electronic music, highlighting Istanbul’s role as a cultural crossroads. We’re excited to screen this film outdoors, as it’ll offer the opportunity to experience the city’s sound and energy alongside the kaleidoscopic musical breadth of Akin’s film.

Airtime Online is an experimental and alternative streaming space created by visual artist and film curator Aslı Baykal which hosts newly produced or existing visual projects. The online platform aims to share inspiring works—one at a time—with a global audience, carefully highlighting the world and storytelling built around each project.

Founded in 2018 in New York, the Airtime Screening Series is an interactive communal cinema experience that offers a screening format outside of traditional structures—an extension of Airtime Online that works to bridge communities online and off. A public platform championing accessibility in art, it is a space for filmmakers at different career levels and backgrounds to show work independently.

We’re thrilled to co-present this program with these folks and to kick off the evening with a DJ set from video and installation artist Meriem Bennani.

We hope you’ll join us for a fun and festive night of film, music and community. See you there!

Special thanks to everyone at Mubi for support of this screening and for the restoration of the film.

Program

Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Instanbul by Fatih Akin

91 mins, 2005

An exhilarating tour through the vibrant contemporary music scene in Istanbul, a city where East meets West, ancient meets modern, and secular meets devout, this film embraces everything from rapid-fire urban rap belted out in underground clubs to Romany circle dances. Director Fatih Akin, a German native born to Turkish immigrants, has found his ideal collaborator in Alexander Hacke, a friend and bassist from industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, who becomes our tour guide. Whether interviewing Akin’s chosen musicians – psychedelic band Baba Zula, Kurdish chanteuse Aynur, the baglama virtuoso Orhan Gencebay – or roaming the streets, Hacke radiates unquenchable enthusiasm. Together, they also challenge conventional ideas of cultural identity; socially as much as musically, Istanbul is shown to thrive on its contradictions.

Program Duration: 43 mins

Bios

Airtime Online is an experimental and alternative streaming space hosting newly produced or existing visual projects. The online platform aims to share inspiring works—one at a time—with a global audience, carefully highlighting the world and storytelling built around each project.

Founded in 2018 in New York, the Airtime Screening Series is an interactive communal cinema experience that offers a screening format outside of traditional structures—an extension of Airtime Online that works to bridge communities online and off.  A public platform championing accessibility in art, it is a space for filmmakers at different career levels and backgrounds to show work independently.

WEBSITE: AIRTIME.WORLD
INSTAGRAM. @airtime.world

Meriem Bennani was born in 1988, in Rabat, Morocco and today lives and works in New York City, New York. Bennani received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2012 after receiving her MFA in Animation from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France in 2011. Moving between the aesthetics of reality television, documentary, animation and more, Bennani’s videos and installations embrace play and the absurd, while contemplating the intricacies of human behavior.

Asli Baykal, founder of Airtime, is a Turkish visual artist and film curator. She studied film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. After graduating, her short documentary called Cherry, about a woman dealing with the public hospital system after falling off a cherry tree in the outskirts of Istanbul participated in the 2013 Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner. Her work is expressed in films and photographs, ranging from documentaries to magical realism in fiction. Her work addresses layered social issues and collective histories embedded in personal journeys using a sense of humor that highlights the subject instead of disguising its gravity.