Bringing together a personal story and collective memory, Between Two Voids made its world premiere at the 41st Warsaw International Film Festival, held October 10–19, 2025. Directed by Letisya Tapan and produced by Dilek Aydın, the film will have its Turkish premiere at the Ankara Film Festival between November 13–21. Exploring the permeable boundaries between individual memory and social history, the film addresses themes of identity, belonging, and resistance in a poetic language. Screened in the festival’s International Documentary Competition section, the film constructs a narrative that invites the audience to feel rather than explain.
In the Footsteps of an Artist: The Life and Memory of Nancy Atakan
Between Two Spaces focuses on the life and work of artist Nancy Atakan, originally from Virginia, who has lived in Istanbul for over fifty years. The film navigates through personal archives, memories, and artworks, creating both an individual story and a visual memory space that bears witness to Turkey’s cultural transformation over the last half-century.
The camera moves between the streets of Istanbul and Atakan’s multi-layered archives, lingering at times on moments that resist completion. Conversations mingling with the city’s buzz, old photographs slowly fading away, and silent memories become elements that define the film’s atmosphere. Tapan brings these pieces together, uniting the political and the poetic on the same plane.
Identity, Memory, and Belonging
Director Letisya Tapan explores the permeability between the personal and the social in Between Two Voids. Drawing on her own life experiences, Tapan focuses on issues of cultural identity, migration, belonging, and visibility in this film. Raised in Istanbul, the director deepened her passion for visual storytelling, which began with film classes at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, with a master’s degree in Visual Communication Design from Istanbul Bilgi University. Her current master’s program in Visual Anthropology in Berlin adds an ethnographic dimension to her cinema.
Tapan’s cinema, shaped by his personal history and cultural diversity, questions the place of individuals within systemic structures and the roles of women in society. The director describes his film as “a personal reflection of cultural boundaries and the search for belonging.” Spanning from Turkey to America, from Istanbul to Galax, where the artist was born, the film is the product of a five-year production process. A co-production of Heimatlos Films, Dochi Media, and Katze Media, Between Two Voids was completed with the support of the U.S. Mission in Turkey. With cinematography by Grzegorz Waszczuk, editing by Melike Kasaplar, and sound design by Vahid Moghadasi, the film documents a period of witnessing and forms of resistance through Atakan’s artistic practice.
The film’s producer, Dilek Aydın, is an independent filmmaker known for her archive-based work and feminist perspective. Aydın, who produces joint productions based in Turkey and Germany through Heimatlos Films, which she founded, has had her projects screened at international festivals such as Venice, IDFA, and Visions du Réel.
In this film, Aydın, together with Letisya Tapan, aims to make both a personal and political story visible. Both artists reinterpret the relationship between individual memory and social history through cinematic language. Following its premiere in Warsaw, Between Two Voids will be screened at international festivals in various cities in the coming months. Its first screening in Turkey will take place at the Ankara Film Festival between November 13–21, 2025.
