The film will be screened during the film series of MUSCAN annual conference in Toronto this coming Wednesday,
5 June, Room 335 at 11:30 am.
Rehavi (Timekeepers) is a short film about the drift of an old mechanical watch that is lost, found and circulated among different owners between Colombia, Turkey, and the United States.The film is a meta-commentary on the meaningfulness and value of Turkish Sufi music that is constantly lost in time, found, and reassembled. Even though the filmwas shot and produced during a fieldwork season in Istanbul it is hardly an ethnographic film. Rehavi is an audiovisual storytelling that intermingles narrative and interviews to produce a multimodal style of ethnographic writing on two central themes of Muslim spirituality in Anatolia: the holography between clocks and humans, and the refusal of an absolute time. The film opens a vignette to lesser-known dimensions of Anatolian audile worlds, and explores how contemporary Turks value Ottoman aesthetic traditions.