10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

The Intercontinental Hotel is a symbol of Turkey’s politically oppressive political regime. During the International Workers’ Day protest for equality in 1977, at the height of communist revolution in Istanbul, an estimated 500,000 students and laborers are attacked by snipers positioned on the hotel’s balconies, resulting in a massacre. Leila’s beloved D/Ali is killed in the ensuing chaos, and the hotel thereafter becomes a site of personal trauma and loss for her. This event underscores the reality of political oppression: however optimistic the countermovement, the forces of power within a militarized, authoritarian state will actively suppress those fighting for change. (This was especially true for Turkey, a country which, by the 1970s, was on an increasingly conservative sociopolitical trajectory.)

When Leila returns to the Intercontinental 13 years after the Worker’s Day massacre, she finds the hotel has been renovated and modernized. This luxury high-rise—which now exclusively serves the wealthy elite—was once the site of a violent clash between the working class and the state, yet now bears no scars of its atrocious past. Its history has been painted over, a transformation that reflects the erasure of painful truths for the sake of comfort and profit.