https://vesaire.org/katiksiz-yalnizlik-alp-zeki-heper/ (15 November 2019)
1962-1963
Male
Director, Writer, Scenarist
“[...] After that he returned to Turkey, and things were beginning shape up. With his first feature film shot in Turkey, A Pale Night's Love Stories (1966), an attempt to tell a love story in an abstract and poetic way, he caught the attention of other directors and critics. The film showed the influence of Bunuel, and because of sexual content was seized by the censor. Heper protested against the ban and wrote in a newspaper article: "Pale Night is a film about a love affair. Love can never be pornographic. What is pornographic is the position the censor takes against the film. The film's narrative is hard to understand, it is related to my own memories. I wanted to do away with the torture, the pressure that comes with love and emotional dependency. I thought freedom was some crazy feeling of love, and I was accused of pornography." The film was entered in the 2nd Golden Orange Film Festival in Antalya, but was shown only at private screenings and not to the festival public. On the whole, the film's visuals were appreciated, but because of the foreign or strange themes and narrative, the film wasn't really noticed. In later years, the film remained unseen, stored in archives and only talked about. After this disappointment, Heper gave the cinema a break. He came back and made a few mainstream films, but at the time, the censor banned them too. The director, exasperated by Turkey's censorship, burned most of his writings. Heper said: "In the end, I became a scriptwriter, a director, a set designer, a cinematographer, an actor, a producer, and a spectator. That is, I was forced to watch my own films all alone." This means that he wasn't able to find a producer and distributor for his films which therefore weren't screened for the public. During the last ten years of his life, he suffered from a mental illness and he died of cancer on 9th January 1984 [...].”
http://trenkel.blogspot.com/2011/11/alper-zeki-heper-and-two-short-films.html?zx=a2543dd2c6f7685f (15 November 2019).
Amateur Cinema