My Mother`s Hair

At the beginning of 2020, My friend Gulzat Matiskova started a long-term movie project with a cultural center from Hamburg, GWA St. Pauli. She met regularly Turkish and Kurdish women who live in Hamburg. In their meetings, they created a close relationship and shared their migration stories with each other. They accepted to take a part in Gulzat`s movie. But one of the participants wanted to stay anonymous. At that moment, I joined the crew with the idea of making an animated documentary. Gulzat already had an interview file, and she gave it to me. I listened to it many times, and I created a mood board and draw alternative characters. The story was too emotional, and I felt like drawing humans won’t work for it. From the story I chose some keywords, for example, village, growing up, roots, and blondness. In the end, I came to the idea of using sunflowers.

Other elements of the story found their natural representations. One of the first things that I draw was the airplane scene with a blackbird. That scene gave me a good feeling to continue. I was also lucky that The story owner accepted to share some photographs with us. They also connected with the other elements very well.

My Mother’s Hair is my first practical work on the animated documentary topic. The year before, I wrote a master’s thesis about it. Jumping from academic work to practical work was scary in the beginning, but when It went well 🙂