Team

Çayan Demirel was born in Istanbul in 1977. After completing his degree at the Faculty of Economics, he started working in documentary film in the year 2000 with oral history projects. In 2006 he completed his documentary ‘38’ about the Dersim events, and he established Surela Film Production in 2008. In 2009 he won the “Best Documentary” award for his film ‘Prison Number 5: 1980-84’ at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, the Ankara Film Festival and SİYAD. His documentary entitled ‘Dr. Şivan’ (2013) is about the life of Dr. Sait Kırmızıtoprak, a Kurdish intellectual who lived between 1935-1971 and who was the founder of the first leftist Kurdish guerilla movement. In 2015 he directed ‘Bakur’ together with Ertuğrul Mavioğlu. Çayan Demirel’s documentaries have been shown at many international film festivals, universities and NGOs.

Koray Kesik started his journey in cinema as a camera assistant at VTR in 1994, and Last Hands by Bahriye Kabadayı and Mustafa Varlık was the first film he worked on as director of photography. He completed several documentaries such as ‘38’ (2006), ‘Prison Number 5: 1980-84’ (2009), ‘Yıldız Alpar: From Bedii Raks Till Today’ (2011), ‘Dr. Şivan’ (2013) and ‘Bakur’ (2015) under the roof of Surela Film Production, and he worked as director of photography on dozens of films produced in Turkey such as Uncle İlhan, Thinking of Ege, Dreams of the Republic and Revolutionary Youth Bridge.

Born in 1979 in Germany, Ayşe Çetinbaş completed her BA in Economics at Istanbul University and received her MA in European Public Policy at Greenwich University. Upon returning to Turkey she worked at various national and international documentary film productions. Between 2008-2014 she served as a member of the executive board of the International 1001 Documentary Film Festival held by BSB (Association of Documentary Filmmakers in Turkey). She worked as a fixer and local producer for foreign media. She co-founded Surela Film Production with Çayan Demirel in 2008 and produced ‘Prison Nr. 5: 1980-84’ (2009), ‘My Child’ (2013), ‘Dr. Şivan’ (2013) and ‘Bakur’ (2015). Her first documentary as director was ‘Yıldız Alpar: From Bedii Raks Till Today’ (2011), and she recently finished her second feature documentary ‘30 Years with Kardeş Türküler’ in 2025.

Born in 1978, Gökçe İnce received her MA in Industrial Design at METU and in Film and Television at Bilgi University. She works as an editor and producer in documentaries. Some of the films she edited are Müezzin, ‘My Child’ and Focus on Infinity. She also runs video and editing workshops for children and young people.

A production assistant at Surela Film Production, Melike Ölker studied American Culture and Literature at Istanbul University and was one of the publishers of Deli Kadın, a quarterly magazine about feminism, literature, culture and art. She has been working as the guest coordinator of Documentarist Istanbul Documentary Days and Which Human Rights? Film Festival since 2016.