14 September – 07 October 2018

Pera Film’s new season program Where is the Playground? tackles the notion of education, systems of learning, teaching, and growing pains and is presented as part of Pera Museum’s new exhibition School Square Galatasaray, an exhibition celebrating Galatasaray High School’s 150th anniversary and Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts’ 4th Design Biennial A School of Schools. The selection highlights certain landmark fiction and documentaries from late 1960s to recent times. James Clavell’s groundbreaking 60s drama To Sir, with Love underlines a British inner city school’s social and racial issues; Frederick Wiseman in his 1969 documentary titled High School explores a school in America, Philadelphia, observing the daily activities of teachers and students. Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult classic Dazed and Confused eavesdrops on a group of American seniors-to-be and incoming freshmen over the course of one day. Larry Clark’s fast-paced debut feature Kids (1995) explores the lives of a group of teenagers confronting life in the 90’s. Laurent Cantet’s 2008 film The Class follows the year in the life of a French schoolteacher working at a high school in a tough neighbourhood of Paris. Cathryn Davis Zommer and Neeley Dawson’s documentary Fully Awake: Black Mountain College explores the college’s progressive pedagogy and radical approach to arts education. Hidden in the mountains of Western North Carolina, Black Mountain College (1933 – 1957) was an influential experiment in education that inspired and shaped twentieth-century American art. In Vicki Abeles’s Beyond Measure documentary, we find a revolution brewing in public schools across the United States; schools that are breaking away from outmoded, test-driven education culture and pioneering a new vision for classrooms. Paul Wright’s recent experimental film Arcadia is provocative stirring up conversation wherever it screens; from the earliest days of movie-making to the present day, through rare and unseen footage, we see the changing relationship the British have with their land and how environment interplays with culture. Last but not least the program ends with Miseducation of Cameron Post, a 2018 American-British drama film directed by Desiree Akhavan, based upon the 2012 novel of the same name by Emily M. Danforth. The story focuses on Cameron Post, a 12-year-old Montana girl who is discovering her own homosexuality. After her parents die in a car crash, she is sent to live with her conservative aunt. She develops a relationship with her best friend and is sent to a conversion camp. Where is the Playground? hopes to shed a new light on the process of education, learning and how different cultures approach the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits.