On 28 May 2013, a small group of environmental protesters occupied Gezi Park in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, angry at government plans to demolish one of the city’s last remaining green spaces and replace it with a shopping mall and replica Ottoman-era barracks. Before dawn on 31 May, police stormed the park to violently disperse the few hundred protesters who had been occupying the space. By the day’s end, hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country were out in the streets.
What followed was months of mass protests that spread to 80 of Turkey’s 81 provinces — the largest wave of civil unrest in the country’s modern history. What had begun as a local environmental dispute had become something much larger: a direct challenge to Prime Minister Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian grip on power, and a flashpoint for years of accumulated anger over media censorship, restrictions on civil liberties, and the erosion of democratic rights.
Başlangıç was filmed across four days in Istanbul in June 2013, at the height of the unrest. Directed by Dominic Brown, the film documents events from the ground as riot police responded to largely peaceful crowds with tear gas, water cannon, and mass force. Eight people were killed and thousands injured as the protests were suppressed. The film captures the atmosphere of a city transformed — the tension, the defiance, and the violence — without commentary or narration.
