The Reflection of Sands
Solène Gün
Situated at the intersection of film and photography, The Reflection of Sands unfolds within a space that is both geographical and intimate—shaped by memory, origin, and experiences of movement and migration. Developed through severaljourneys across Turkey, from Mardin to Mersin, the project follows a familial route that becomes the starting point for a broader reflection on belonging, transmission, and possible futures.
Working with young men of Kurdish, Turkish, and Syrian backgrounds, Solène Gün explores their aspirations, life perspectives, and relationships to places marked by displacement and transformation. The resulting film interweaves individualnarratives into a sensitive and layered story in which past and present, personal memories and collective histories, continuously overlap. The presence of the artist’s father as a narrator introduces a generational dimension, linking lived experienceto childhood recollections, oral traditions, and inherited stories.
Water, ever-present—river in the east, sea in the south—acts as a vibrant thread of continuity and resonance. It becomes a passage and a breath, an attempt to return both to the land and to oneself, a symbolic space where a surge of freedomseems to brush, with a light beat, against exile, return, and the desire for grounding.
Oscillating between documentary and fiction, the project brings into view a fragile, temporary community whose identity remains in the making. Empathy, solidarity, and transmission are central, as are vulnerability, intimacy, and the bonds thatconnect individuals to one another and to their environment. Rather than fixing identities, the images accompany a process—that of a youth in motion, shaped by generational memory and the ongoing search for belonging.
The Reflection of Sands ultimately unfolds as a sensitive experiential field in which everything remains in flux—light, sound, bodies, landscapes, and voices—transforming the image into a site of shared memory, both personal and collective.
Year of production: 2022-2025
