Missing Documentaries: A Screening and Discussion with Sibil Çekmen and Alix Beeston

Missing Documentaries, new short film by Sibil Çekmen, explores Turkey’s modern history of unfinished documentary works: the countless documentary projects that have been initiated but never filmed, filmed but never edited, edited yet unseen. Çekmen will be joined by Alix Beeston, Senior Research Fellow at Maison de la Création et de l'Innovation, for a post-screening conversation around the obstacles, challenges, and untapped potential of documentary creation in Turkey and beyond.

The event will begin by an introduction of the film and will be followed by a conversation between the hosts and the audience with a Q&A session. The screening will end with a moment over coffee and tea.

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Dr. Sibil Çekmen is a filmmaker, reporter, translator, and scholar whose work focuses on political and activist documentary cinema in Turkey. Emerging from her PhD research, completed at Lumière University in 2022, Missing Documentaries is a desktop documentary that draws on interviews with directors from Turkey to explore issues of authoritarianism and censorship in the film industry over the last decade. It played as part of the feature Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in March 2025.

Dr. Alix Beeston (Fellows 2025 - GATES*) is a writer and scholar based at Cardiff University, UK, and a leading expert in the study of unfinished film and literature. The co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (2023), she is now at work on a study that reimagines women’s literary and cinema history in the twentieth-century United States through the lens of the unfinished.

*Funded by the French government's Programme d'Investissement Avenir and implemented by ANR France 2030.