Can Candan

I am an independent filmmaker and academic based in Istanbul, working at the intersection of documentary cinema, history, and politics. My work engages with questions of memory, power, and representation, with a particular focus on Turkey and its entanglements with broader global histories.

I hold a BA in Film and Video from Hampshire College (1992) and an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University (1999), a terminal degree comparable to a PhD. I have taught film and media courses and workshops in the United States and Turkey, including at Temple University and Hampshire College, as well as at Istanbul Bilgi University, Sabancı University, Yeditepe University, and Boğaziçi University. At Istanbul Bilgi University, I served as chair of the Film and Television Department before resigning in 2005.

My academic work focuses on documentary cinema as both a critical practice and a field of inquiry. I am co-editor (with Suncem Koçer) of Kurdish Documentary Cinema in Turkey: The Politics and Aesthetics of Resistance (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). I am currently working with Sonay Ban on a comprehensive Turkish-language book and a series of English-language articles on the history of documentary cinema in Turkey. I was a founding member of the docIstanbul Center for Documentary Studies (2007) and part of the organizing team of the Visible Evidence International Documentary Studies Conference (2010).

I have been making films since 1989. My work has been screened internationally across festivals, universities, museums, broadcast platforms, and in movie theaters. My feature-length documentaries—Duvarlar, Mauern, Walls (2000), 3 Hours (2008), and My Child (2013)—engage with migration, human rights, social struggle, and the politics of everyday life, and have received international recognition.

I am currently developing Nuclear alla Turca, a feature-length documentary that examines the long, complex, and often overlooked history of “the nuclear” in Turkey. The project brings together archival research, lesser-known stories, and a critical perspective on how nuclear technologies—military and civilian—have shaped the country’s past and present. It asks how we arrived at this nuclear crossroads—at a moment when Turkey is building its first nuclear power plant—and what it means to reckon with that history today.

My recent work extends beyond film into research-based visual practice. In 2026, my project Nükleer İbrahimlerin İzleri (Traces of the Nuclear Ibrahims) was presented in the exhibition Breaking Through a Dam at SALT Beyoğlu. The work traces the deployment of U.S. Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey in the early 1960s, combining archival materials with contemporary satellite imagery to reveal the material and historical traces of nuclear infrastructures.

Between 2007 and 2021, I served as a full-time faculty member at Boğaziçi University. Since 2021, my academic position has been the subject of a series of dismissals and court rulings, and remains under legal review before the Constitutional Court of Turkey.

Alongside my academic and artistic work, I have been actively engaged in struggles for academic freedom, freedom of expression, and institutional accountability. In 2012, I contributed to the establishment of Boğaziçi University’s Sexual Harassment Prevention Commission. In 2014, I resigned as head of the jury of the national documentary competition at the Antalya International Film Festival in protest against censorship. In 2016, I was among the signatories of the Academics for Peace declaration and was subsequently prosecuted and tried in a heavy penal court, facing a prison sentence; following a Constitutional Court ruling in 2019 affirming freedom of expression, all charges against signatories were dismissed.

In 2021, I received the Turkish Film Critics Association (SİYAD) Honor Award. I continue to work across film, research, and teaching, contributing to critical conversations on documentary cinema, public memory, and the politics of representation.