BINNUR KARAEVLI

Director/Producer

innur Karaevli is an award-winning director/producer with an expansive background in film and video. She was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. She attended Robert College High School in Istanbul. She received her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University in Drama and started her career as a theatre director in 1989. She received the prestigious Bud Yorkin Directing Award, for her work in directing theatre, right out of college. She worked at the Arena Stage, Comedia Dell Arte and San Diego Reportory Theatres as an Assistant Director and a Dramaturg. During her tenure at the San Diego Repertory Company, she co-founded and co-produced "WordWorks", a literary theatre laboratory for new plays. She worked at the Los Angeles Theatre Center as a director and a literary manager. In 1991, she founded the "Platform", an acclaimed political cabaret. She attended University of Southern California’s Graduate Film School and earned her MFA in 1996.

er short narrative films, Dance of the Whirling Dervish and Evelyn of the Desert received top prizes from several festivals including, Nurnberg International Film Festival, Germany; New Orleans International Film Festival; and Istanbul International Film Festival. She has worked on many independent documentaries and narrative films in the US, Germany and Turkey. She has extensive international producing credits for many commercial production companies including RIDLEY SCOTT & ASSOCIATES. When she worked on the PBS/BBC documentary The Great War as a researcher and coordinator, she did extensive work with the Ottoman Archives in Turkey. She has also produced and directed a short documentary, Global Friendship, for the Space Camp Turkey in Izmir and Global Friendship Foundation in Los Angeles. Binnur produced and directed Searching for Paradise, a documentary about cultural identity, which won the Best Documentary awards at the Moondance International Film Festival and WinFemme Film Festival in 2002. Searching for Paradise, mostly shot in Istanbul, is a film about living between the East and the West; Islam and Christianity; the demands of tradition and the urgency of the present. She is currently working on several documentaries about modern Turkey and the Ottoman Empire and a narrative feature that takes place in Turkey.

JILL RYTIE LUTZ

Co-Producer

ill Rytie Lutz is a director/producer who started and currently runs the documentary division at Randall Wallace's Wheelhouse Entertainment. Rytie and Wheelhouse are in pre-production on a historical documentary series for the Discovery Channel entitled "Last Stand" which she will produce. After joining the Wheelhouse team in 2000, Rytie worked as Randall Wallace's assistant at the company and on the set of We Were Soldiers. Her first foray into the world of documentaries was as the associate producer of the 2002 documentary Getting it Right: Behind the Scenes of We Were Soldiers which aired on Showtime and is featured on the film's DVD. Her first directing and producing experience was on her 16mm short film Chicken Pox Dipper, which premiered at the Atlanta Film Festival in 1999. In 1997, Rytie graduated magna cum laude from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism and mass communications. Immediately after college, she moved to Los Angeles as one of 27 specially selected interns for the prestigious Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Internship Program, and then worked for several years as a production assistant, script supervisor and assistant director on feature films, corporate videos and television productions before joining the Wheelhouse. Rytie is a member of GRIT (Girls Reeling It Together), a director-driven organization of professional female filmmakers, where she met Karaevli in 2002. In 2005, she married Michael Lutz, and they currently reside in Santa Monica, California.

FILMMAKER'S STATEMENT

by Binnur Karaevli

s I began researching Women Who Dare two years ago, I had no intention of making a film about Turkish women. I was more interested in making a film that followed up on the themes of my previous documentary, Searching for Paradise which was all about coming to terms with Western education and Eastern heritage, as it were.

n fact when I started out, the title of my new film was, Where East Meets West. However, the last time I was in Istanbul, I spent a lot of time walking down the narrow cobblestone streets and talking to all kinds of people. And as I sat sipping Turkish coffee by the beautiful Bosphorus, my ideas for my new film started to shift.

he people that intrigued me the most were the women of Istanbul and, in turn, Turkish women as a whole. I met so many interesting women ranging from doctors, professors, and businesswomen to street vendors, maids, and religious conservatives. The colorful tapestry of women who made up Turkish society drew me in and offered me a chance to tell a story about courage and perseverance through the lives of these women. The contrasts between the women were even more interesting. While some of these women enjoyed the basic freedoms we take for granted in the West, others still needed their husband's permission to go to the store. Some women in the Southeastern part of Turkey did not even know that they had rights as individuals while a substantial number of Turkish corporations were run by powerful women.

urkey is a secular democracy with a predominantly Muslim population. Turkish women are much better off than the other women of the Middle East. When the Turkish Republic was formed in 1923, the founder of the republic, Ataturk made clear choices by secularizing the country and giving equal rights and the right to vote to Turkish women. Chadors, turbans and religious clothing were banned from government institutions and women were liberated from the confines of the dark veils. As a result of these freedoms, within 80 years, Turkish women became an integral part of society. Many Turkish women are educated and professional. However, the patriarchal and Islamic roots of the Ottoman Empire that ruled Turkey for 600 years still persist. Many women, though seemingly free, still limit themselves by the demands of tradition, religion and family.

rowing up as a young girl in Istanbul, I was always intrigued by the unspoken societal rules for young girls and women. It seemed to me that the biggest concern of my mother was always "what would the neighbors think?" My mother was not the only one to have this ominous concern about the neighbors' perceptions, but it felt like the entire society behaved according to the same worries. The other preoccupation was a woman's honor, and as a child, I never understood why a woman's honor was regarded in the sexual context and a man's was regarded differently.

ll these long-forgotten thoughts about being a woman in Turkey came back to me when I found myself discussing issues such as the right to wear the Islamic headscarf to government offices and government subsidized universities. More than 80 years after the liberation from the veil, some Islamic women took to the streets for the right to wear the Islamic headscarf. The great irony of this situation still intrigues me. I believe that there is a direct correlation between women's rights and the lack of democracy in the Muslim Middle East. It is no coincidence that Turkey is the only progressive and democratic country in the region and the only country with a constitution that grants equal rights to women.

owever, I was intent on making a film about interesting women who were involved in the arts and politics and who contributed something to their communities. When I met Belkis, Nur and Banu, I knew that the film would be about women of all ages who try to live authentic lives. I've identified with the stories of these women, perhaps because I have been trying to live a life not governed by society, tradition or other people's wishes but by my own truth. Therefore, I decided that my film would be about women who fight the system, and dare to make a difference and boldly embark upon journeys to fulfill their destinies.