Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater

Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater draws on footage shot during the struggle that began in 2010 against the demolition of Emek Cinema and intensified until the theater’s destruction in 2013. The documentary forms a collective narrative from the records of audiences defending their right to the city. In showing the debates around protecting a cinema open to the street, the film reveals that the struggle was not only about an important cultural heritage site in Istanbul but also about the imagination it fostered and that sustained it. The film comes to life as the shared story of those who claimed this collective imagination and sense of possibility, in solidarity with other urban and cinema struggles, offering a compelling example of cinema as a form of resistance for the city.