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Image Acts is the name under which Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel gather the film, video, sound, and text work they produce together, in dialogue, or independently. It is not a company, an organisation, or a legal entity. Rather, it is an evolving audiovisual basin shaped by their ongoing practice as filmmakers, academics, artists, and activists. Their works explore image politics: the ways images act, and the ways people act with, through, and alongside images.
Kuryel and Yücel have been collaborating since 2015. Films and videos they produced from that period onward appear under Works, while Related brings together side projects, curated programs, articles, audio, interviews etc. Notably, in 2023 Kuryel and Yücel released two documentaries under the Image Acts name: March, 2020: A Memoir and Translating Ulysses.
In 2025, they co-wrote and co-produced happiness — a “desktop-diary” asking how one can sleep in times of genocide. Directed by Yücel, the film premiered at Visions du Réel and was screened as one of the opening films of IDFA 2025.
They are currently working on the editing of Class Outside (co-directed with Deniz Buga), a collective documentary on the 2024 Amsterdam student encampments in solidarity with Palestine, capturing dreams, everyday acts of resistance, solidarity, and friction.
Another key work is The City and the Messiah, co-directed by Kuryel and Raşel Meseri: a 30-minute essay film tracing the afterlives of Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century self-declared Jewish Messiah from Izmir and the urban legends around this figure.
They currently have two feature documentaries in development: This Thing Called Camera, exploring alternative histories of the means of production of cinema, which Aylin and Fırat wrote about in an article published in Making & Breaking; and 8th of March with Stella, following one of the foundational figures of the feminist struggle in Turkey.
Although Image Acts does not yet have a formal manifesto, their working notes — fragments from shooting, editing, and thinking — can be accessed below. The story continues.