Bahar

Bahar is a 52-minute documentary about a Turkish transsexual, who has lived through many periods of tumultuous times, each of these chapters a fragment of her life marked by a different name she has chosen to call herself after abandoning her original name of Mustafa: Ayla (Aura), Ülkü (Ideal) and Bahar (Spring). The film was shot in Turkey with interviews conducted around the time of Bahar’s much-desired facial surgery. Having a sex change operation is surprisingly easy in Turkey. But the bill a transsexual has to pay is to be cast away from an ordinary life and suffer from the sensationalistic pathos that is cast on her life by the mainstream society. Transsexuals are often perceived only as sex-workers one sees on the streets in the night or on the news. They are portrayed as screaming sub-human creatures to be kept away from. With this work director Huseyin Karagoz wants to present a different perception of the lives of transsexuals and thus to show that the emotions, the passions, the warmth, the love, the insecurities are not much different than those similar feelings shared by the mainstream society. In Turkish with English sub-titles.