familiar strangers

Murat Sayginer, the talented Turkish creator of The Flying Fish, which I reviewed last September, brings a sense of dizziness and calm in his short film, Familiar Strangers. Using "deepfake technology," (a notable effect in The Irishman) Sayginer gives us a rotating two-line assembly of two hundred-fifty four faces, all famous actors. Admittedly, I didn't recognize them as actors for the first few seconds of the near four minute short (you can visit Murat's insta for a closer look of the individuals). A pleasant, hazy blending of all the faces was the immediate effect it had on me, before noticing their specific features. Familiar Strangers is backed with Bach's Air on the G String, which adds to its timeless feel. As he did in The Flying Fish, Sayginer mixes classicism with new tech effectively and evocatively. ***

-Jeffery Berg

the flying fish

Turkish artist Murat Sayginer's animated short, The Flying Fish, is a dazzling achievement of music and visuals. Schematically, the film is a metaphysical journey of life and death with sleek geometric representations--from spheres wriggling sperm-like to a neon-drenched afterlife. Scintillating, metallic textures and imagery abound, juxtaposing the ancient and pure with slick and occasionally glitchy, computerized sheen.

One of the most compelling images was a skeleton hunched within the cage of an overturned shopping cart--an obvious metaphor linking death and consumerism--but the image sticks and is brilliantly evoked in a desert wasteland of scattered bones. Highlight for me in The Flying Fish was the "The Safe Zone" which includes pulsating crystal rectangular bars lit in hyper colors with Sayginer's effective score pumping at shiny synth heights. Riding off into a neon sunset, it becomes a comforting closer to Sayginer's dense menagerie.  ***

-Jeffery Berg