Sabri Kaliç

Sabri Kaliç — Biography

An experimental approach to cinema set Sabri Kaliç apart as a Turkish director, writer and translator. Part of his filmography consists of tiny experiments lasting only seconds; A Fassbinder Lie (1987), a single frame long, is said to be the shortest film in the world. His cinema research and his translations of Woody Allen and Irvine Welsh were just as central to his work. He died in 2012 in his home city of Izmir.

After the Ankara Police College (1984) he studied film directing at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Dokuz Eylül University. His first works were 16 mm black-and-white shorts made in 1987: PO"y"EM runs four seconds and 59" fifty-nine. He then turned to VHS video art, such as Bolero and Douche Opera. He moved to Istanbul in 1992, worked for a time as an assistant to Sinan Çetin, and stepped into directing with the television film Midnight Hitchhiker (Gece Yarısı Otostopçusu) in 1995. The Spider Web (1998) and Midnight Stories (2000) followed.

His writing earned recognition too. Deneysel Sinemanın Kısa Tarihi (A Short History of Experimental Cinema, 1992) won the Ministry of Culture's cinema book of the year award, his screenplay Ateşe Koşan Kelebekler took the 1996 TV series script award, and Yoğurtlu Spagetti won the Orhan Murat Arıburnu film story award. A book on Andy Warhol's experimental cinema appeared in 1997. His translations include Annie Hall, Trainspotting and Ecstasy Club, and in 2005 he received the experimental film award of Meta-Film Underground in the Netherlands.