Ayten Mutlu Saray: Invisible Life • May 11, 2014

What is the meaning of foreign, being “the stranger” in German-speaking countries like Switzerland and Germany? You can never have arrived when once you were displaced. The displacement is the source of fictional biography, you are not only the translator of your biography, but also the storyteller. More and more your own biography becomes something strange to you, as if it is not your life, but the life of someone else, someone you don’t know, you never saw, you never met… s/he is far and near at the same time. Reality became fiction, fiction became your reality. That is what it is to be “the stranger” in German-speaking countries. Your person is visible but your life, that which was one time real, becomes invisible!

“Zara” is about how exiled people are forced to live their fate not only as an external state, but equally so as an inner destiny. Therein, several time levels are involved: a past which is lost, a present which is ruined, and a future which is colored with hope. An open, empty plain stretches out around the village of Zara, dotted with ruins of abandoned places. Here, the film’s characters are searching for what they’ve lost: letters, childhoods, homes, friends, parents and children… The village of Zara constitutes the fulcrum of a quest for a safe place—a search which gives rise to the unfolding of the remembered and the dreamt; all within the realm of the imagined present. In Zara, the Cem ceremony is a celebration of the quest for hope. http:// www.sarayfilm.com.