When Hakan Sahin moved from Turkey to western Canada, he was depressed, with no friends and no way to communicate. At just 12 years old, he was at a pivotal time in his life. Right at the cusp of fully experiencing Turkish culture, he was placed into an unfamiliar, unforgiving world.
After finding his place in Canada, he learned filmmaking skills at a New York City workshop, and has been making films as a hobby ever since. Now, Hakan lives in Harvard, draws cartoons for the Harvard Press, and works on his next feature film. Here is part of his story.
Hakan Sahin. (Photo by Tim Clark)
I was really inspired by a Turkish film that I watched many, many years ago. I saw this film that was made by a Turk that was banned in a European country–I think it was Denmark–because it depicted police in Denmark in a bad light. In a weird way, I was proud that it was a Turkish film that was banned in Europe, which you usually expect the other way around. So that’s how my interest got started. I didn’t get into shooting film until much, much later.
[First] I went into business, and the business involved trucking, which is a family business, trucking oil, crude oil basically. So just imagine northern Canada, you’re looking at almost 22 hours of light in summer. So long days, long boring days. And these are years when we obviously did not have the internet, but we had what we call a satellite dish, which was giving us 200 to 300 channels, and they had a lot of movies. So I would watch a lot of movies.
[But] there were no reality TV shows that showed life in the remote areas. So I thought, this is interesting because I could sort of show this life, but not too many people are familiar with it. But how do I do that, because I have no equipment, and I don’t know how to shoot film.
The first one that I would call my own was a short that I shot in the place I was working in Canada. This is on my own. Then I sent it to festivals. It got accepted at a few festivals, and I was more intrigued.
So then I said, ‘Wow, this doesn’t sound too hard. I’ll just shoot a feature film.’
Well, it’s a whole different animal, shooting a feature film, which has to be like 75 minutes or longer. So I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot from that. Then I sent it to festivals and it won an award in France, where I was getting rejected by a lot of festivals.
I was very nervous. It’s the first time I’ve experienced a festival and participating as a filmmaker. So I traveled there and of course I’m lugging these canisters of 35 millimeter film, which is very heavy. So I arrived there and it was a French town in eastern France so except the organizers, a lot of the people, attendees, didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak French.
So it was just the anticipation of … how many people would show up, how many people would stay?
So the nervousness went away once the film started rolling. And it was like total euphoria afterwards because the questions that you get sort of give you a sense of how people received the film. I don’t remember getting a lot of praise, like, ‘Oh, I love this film.’ Not that kind of thing. But [by] the questions that you got, you knew that they were into it because, as I said, the type of film that I make requires paying attention and an interpretation.
As I got used to it, it got easier and more fun, really. I think I can say that I make films just to participate in film festivals. It’s just so much fun to interact with people and get their feedback right after the screening.
[To make a living], I do corporate video work, where you get a set of instructions, basically telling you what to do. So you’re basically a technician. Very mundane, very uninspiring, but that’s what pays.
If you want to do something on your own, you’ve got to pay the price.
My last project was the most expensive one and required a lot of my time. I shot the thing in three weeks, but completing it took like a year. But it took me almost five years to get funding for that thing. And I’m still dealing with the paperwork.
I got the funding from Telefilm Canada, which in their mission statement, it says to promote Canadian culture. And then they came back to me and said, we’d like to make some suggestions, if you are okay with that, we’ll consider going to the next stage on this thing.
And then the notes I got were all [about] making it more mainstream. I agreed. Then when it came to shooting, I just changed it back to what I had.
Bodhi Chadran. (Photo by Tim Clark).
Hakan Sahin was interviewed by Bromfield sophomore Bodhi Chadran. The interview was transcribed by John Osborn, who also assisted Bodhi in preparing the interview for publication. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Report for Harvard is a project of the Harvard Press and was made possible by the generous support of Rollstone Bank and the Harvard Schools Trust.
