Turkish filmmaker Eylem Kaftan got to know beekeepers when she was filming a documentary series about urban farmers. That inspired her to write and direct her first feature film, Hive. Kaftan tells HFPA journalist Lena Basse about the inspirational meeting with a woman who needed to kill a bear to save her hives.  “The fact that she regretted it made me fall in love with this story because she had that strong feeling of guilt and she was so haunted by the moaning of the dying bear. That single detail about the moaning of the bear, like a human, haunted me and that was the driving force for Hive  – to talk about our struggle with nature and the fact that we forget our true essence.”

The story is timely because increasing numbers of well-educated people are leaving big cities to go back to nature. “They are hoping they can find peace and utopia in nature. But it doesn’t turn out as easy as they dream of because nature has her own language and has a lot of hardships for people like us, modern people who are cut off from nature.”

During the Covid pandemic, she has been able to work with new projects. “I did a little internet series pilot and now I have one feature in development and one documentary. The fiction is based on Vendetta Song. I decided to make my second feature a film based on my documentary of this Canadian wannabe filmmaker traveling from Canada to Diyarbakir, in search of her aunt’s life, tracing her footsteps. Her aunt doesn’t have a tombstone, doesn’t have any photos taken, doesn’t have a birth record, but she’s a legend in people’s memories, and she is putting the pieces together like a clumsy detective.”

Her upcoming documentary tells a story of three young girls in rebirth and transformation after going through a traumatic childhood and becoming a source of inspiration for other girls.“It’s about three girls who were abused by their fathers, they had domestic assault, they were sexually and physically assaulted by their fathers and they are putting their fathers in jail and starting a new life together and becoming new inspiration and hope for other girls who go through the same trauma.”

Hive is on Netflix.

Listen to the podcast and hear what kind of things she was afraid of before and during the filming of HiveHiveHiveVendetta Song, a story about tracing the footsteps of her aunt and the people who killed her; how she was able to change one woman’s destiny; why she decided to study philosophy; and is her thesis of three Turkish movies from the ’80s still relevant today?