Project Overview

Magic and Dream is an experimental stop-motion papercut animation built entirely from archival pages of Hayat Magazine (1957), a publication that once held cultural significance in my country.

The film reconstructs childhood memory through a surreal visual language, using only printed fragments from a single historical source. No additional magazines or external visual material were used in the process.

''During my childhood, I often spent time at my grandmother’s house, where I would go through her magazine collection to pass the time. Being illiterate at the time, I could not fully understand the text, but the images and fragmented letters began to form their own meanings in my mind.''

Over time, these visual impressions started to merge with my dreams. The images I encountered during the day would reappear at night, reshaped by imagination and memory. Words I could not yet read transformed into symbolic structures in my thoughts.

This film brings those two worlds together fragmented visual memory and dream logic translated into a stop-motion animation that reconstructs how meaning was formed before language.

The film was officially selected by three international film festivals: ROFIFE (Turkey, 2022), Lift-Off First-Time Filmmaker Sessions (United Kingdom, 2022), and İzmir Short Film Festival (Turkey, 2022).