Refia Dermancıoğlu

For ‘Var ama Yok’, I travelled to Burj Al Babas, an unfinished luxury development in Mudurnu, Turkey: hundreds of identical castle-shaped villas spread across a hillside. Conceived as an extravagant real-estate dream for wealthy investors, the project collapsed before completion.

 

What remains is a surreal ghost city suspended between ambition and failure, fantasy and abandonment.

There, I staged an opening ceremony. I cut a ribbon. I interviewed locals living next to the castles and asked them what this place could become if it belonged to them.

 

The film inhabits the tension between imagination and reality, between what a place could be and what it actually is.

 

Starting from fiction, reality took over