Touching Feeling (2019)

Aykan Safoğlu takes his artistic friendship with Nihad Nino Pušija as the point of departure for Touching Feeling. Their friendship began in 2014 in the nGbK, an artists’ association in Berlin, where Pušija has been active since the 1990s as an artist, curator, activist, and photographer. Pušija has been recording the world around him for years with his camera: queer life in Kreuzberg, the life of the Romani in the former Yugoslavia and in German refugee shelters; everyday occurrences, but also scenes of flight and migration. Pušija’s photographs form the basis for the film; mark by mark, Safoğlu uncovers them on the black screen. The scratches on the picture’s surface turn into contours and fragments: prompting Safoğlu’s reflection on his role as observer, the defiant beauty of everyday life, and the terrible rupture that war and destruction left in their trail in the 1990s across the Balkans.