"My Name Is Happy," a feature documentary about Mutlu Kaya, the screenings of which continue now in different parts of Europe, has won 14 awards in international festivals so far and may be on its way to competing in the 2024 Academy Awards.
The film is about Kaya, a young Kurdish woman from Diyarbakır, a promising singer who was gunned down in 2015 by a man whose marriage proposal she had refused.
Only a teenager, she was on the brink of breaking through to the final of Turkey's Got Talent in 2015 when the shooting occurred. She suffered life-threatening injuries but survived with a bullet in her brain.
The film had its world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2022, and its US premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in February 2023.
My Name is Happy won the Human Rights/Human Wrongs Award at the Human Documentary Film Festival in Oslo in March 2023, and won the Storyboard Collective Impact Award and the PGI Youth Jury Award at the 21st FIFDH Film Festival in Geneva.
The UK premiere was delayed due to the devastating February 6 earthquakes in Turkey and the theatrical release in the country took place in mid-May that opened with a sold-out UK premiere at the Soho Curzon cinema on May 19th, 2023.
The film has received exceptional reviews in the UK during its festival run, with Screen Daily stating "... a compelling protagonist... using her voice as a powerful, defiant instrument of protest". While Cineuropa said "The inspiring story of Mutlu Kaya, a teenage singing sensation who overcomes being shot to become a fearless survivor and advocate for women's rights in Turkey and beyond".
The film was recently honored with the Golden Horn at the 63rd Krakow Film Festival, the highest accolade the festival jury can award for a feature documentary where it was in competition with 15 other films. The award automatically qualifies the film for consideration in the feature documentary section at the 2024 Academy Awards.
Kaya's story: Surviving and resisting male violence
Mutlu Kaya, a young woman from Ergani, Diyarbakır, was a promising singer. In 2015 her dreams were about to come true when she reached the finals of Turkey's Got Talent. Days before the final she was gunned down by a man whose marriage proposal she had refused.
Remarkably she survived – with a bullet in her brain. After years of rehabilitation from life-threatening injuries, the family was again struck by violence. This time, Mutlu's carer, her sister Dilek, did not survive a murder attempt by another jilted suitor.
The documentary follows Mutlu and her close-knit musical family through their turbulent ordeals, their struggle to recover, and their fight for justice and the rights of women to live free from male violence in Turkey and beyond. Intimate shots of the Kaya family are complemented by archive footage of excerpts from the talent show and news items on this urgent topic.
More determined than ever, Mutlu rallies her two million online followers with a protest song addressing the issue of femicide.
The making the documentary
Nick Read and Ayşe Toprak are the co-directors of the feature documentary. When discussing their involvement in the film at the UK premiere, Read and Toprak jointly stated:
"We began speaking with Mutlu and her family seven years ago in 2016, soon after she returned home from the hospital. At that time, she was still convalescing. We had to be patient, to find the right time to build a relationship.
In late 2020, soon after a series of widely reported and brutal cases of femicide in Turkey, and not long after the murder of her sister, we began filming with Mutlu and her family. Working with an entirely Turkish, and mainly female crew, Mutlu gifted us her trust.
Our vision was to capture the intimate and epic nature of Mutlu's story - to tell it with passion but also compassionately, through the lens of cinema, rather than conventional reportage. We hope audiences will enter her world, share her perspective, limited but not defined by her disability... most of all to celebrate her as a survivor.
Her's is a universal story, one that reflects on escalating global issues of domestic violence and women's rights."
The team of the film has therefore planned a social impact campaign alongside the film's release, with Mutlu joining the debate, "to increase pressure on governments and leaders to reduce the risks women face – daily, worldwide."
Mutlu Kaya has participated online in the Q&A session that followed the screening at the Pordenone Docs Fest in Italy in April.
The film is co-produced by BAFTA, Emmy Award & Prix Italia winning independent production company October Films, and executive produced by Adam Bullmore ("End of the Storm", "Viagra the Little Blue Pill", and "This is Football") & Siobhan Sinnerton ("For Sama", "Lyra", and "In Her Hands")
The directors
Nick Read is an Emmy Award & BAFTA-nominated filmmaker known for making acclaimed observational documentaries. He has shot & directed over 50 films, many of them in remote or high-risk locations ("Inside Israel's Jails", "Slumdog Children of Mumbai", "The Condemned", etc). His work has won two Foreign Press Association awards, The Rory Peck Impact Award, and the Creative Diversity Award for best documentary.
His most recent feature documentary, "Bolshoi Babylon", produced by Simon Chinn, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, opened in 100 UK cinemas, and was long-listed for the 2018 BAFTA & Academy Awards.
Ayşe Toprak recently relocated from Istanbul to London. A graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, she has an MA in Media Studies at the New School. From 2011, she worked extensively for Al Jazeera in Turkey, London, and Doha, producing social and political documentaries in the Middle East. In 2016 Ayse began work on her first feature documentary, "Mr Gay Syria".
To date, the film has been screened at over 70 international festivals including IDFA, Sheffield DocFest, MOMA fortnight, Chicago Film Festival etc. The film won 14 awards, many for promoting human rights.
The trailer for the 82 minute film can be found here.
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