The World On My Head
Turkey | 2022 | 10' Kurdish (Turkish, English subtitles)
Directed by Yalçın Çiftçi
The ‘kofi’ is a traditional type of headdress worn by women in villages in Adiyaman, Turkey. Embroidered with colorful motifs from Anatolia, variations in the kofi may represent differences in region, ethnicity, and marital status among the women who wear them. Once, young girls who reached puberty would cover their heads with kofi, and after they married, they would wear a fez over the kofi. Today, as the uniformity of modern life rapidly encroaches upon age-old cultural patterns and behavior, traditional items of clothing like the kofi are gradually being forgotten. Nowadays only a few elderly women in the villages are continuing this tradition. “World on My Head”, the debut documentary from photographer Yalçın Çifçi, introduces us to three of them: İsmihan Aslan, from Kömür (central Adiyaman); Dilber Güzel, from Kurudere (Çelikhan), and Emine Afşin, from Hacıhalil (Besni).
Born in southeastern Turkey in the province of Adiyaman in 1992, Yalçın Çifçi graduated from the Department of Turkish Language and Literature of Marmara University in Istanbul. “World on My Head”, which is Çifçi’s first documentary, grew out of a photography project that he worked on for three years. “I like to include folk culture and the disappearing cultural values of Anatolia in my works,” says Çifçi. “Recently, I started to focus on my documentary photography projects. I try to tell people stories using the visual power of photography. Çifçi has received many awards in photography competitions in Turkey and abroad. His photography projects, including "The World on My Head", "Winter Sleep", and "The Journey of Tobacco", have also been published in important magazines. “World on My Head” has been screened at numerous festivals in turkey, including EgeArt Sanat Günleri, where it won third prize in the Short Film Competition (National Category).
