KONTRA PEDAL
Writer & Director: Orhan Murat Bahtiyar
Producer: Mevlut Akkaya
Type: Short/Fiction
Zahra (34) lives in a Turkish refugee camp together with her child. She shares a tent with another refugee family who are her distant relatives and she wants to apply for asylum in Europe. She hears on the TV that certain criteria were sought in those applying for asylum in Europe to facilitate social integration. Zahra’s command of Turkish is not adequate and because of the images of women riding bicycles in the news and on posters, she thinks that this is one of those criteria and tries to learn how to ride a bike until the interview day. Despite obstacles such as her hijab and cultural differences, she manages to cycle all the way to the site of the interview, where an official tells her they need to take a photograph to use in the document and asks her to remove her veil.