Tülin Özdemir’s work asks the question, “Who is today’s modern woman?” The filmmaker made her first short documentary, “Our Wedding,” in 2008 and expanded on its subject of early marriage in her 2013 feature doc debut, “Beyond Ararat.” Those two projects and her latest film, “Red Moon,” complete a trilogy exploring women, marriage, and identity.

“Red Moon” premiered at the 2019 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on April 27.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

TÖ: It’s a portrait of a woman, my mother’s little sister Tüncay. It’s a kind of road movie through four generations of women, from the village of Tüncay’s childhood in Turkey to her life today in Brussels. The film focuses on a sister who has been in the shadow of her family.

Highlighting the stories of unseen women — or women we ignore — reveals the subtle mechanisms of a system that enslaves women’s bodies and minds. That system is still present in the heart of Europe today.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

TÖ: The story of my aunt Tüncay is a common one — that is, girls being forced into early marriage. This film is the story of many women, including myself. Marriage is still a contracted exchange of properties throughout the world today. It is an act of appropriation of the female body, and a guarantee of biological reproduction for a system of patriarchal domination. Forced marriage, still widespread today, is a form of violence.

Ask yourself a simple question: “Why are we still getting married?” And by “married,” I do not mean the desire to live together between two people who love each other, or a symbolic ritual to mark a freely chosen union. My question is about the institution of civil marriage.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

TÖ: Cinema allows you to see beyond images and appearances. For me, film reveals what we do not see or what we do not want to see. Cinema is a Pandora’s box. It is access to the real, access to our real relationship to the world. I hope my film manages to give the spectator enough space to leave the cinema with a sharper vision. With “Red Moon,” [I want the audience to leave with] a better view about early and forced marriage — a better comprehension about the mechanism behind it.

I would like the spectator to think and question. But I would especially like him or her to see between the images, in the well-hidden structures of the enslavement of the woman’s body.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

TÖ: The relationship between two sisters, my mother and the main character of the film, my aunt Tüncay. The relationship between them was almost nonexistent. My mother is the eldest of nine siblings; she has occupied a central place in the family and the family’s emigration to Europe. And it was she who married her little sister off at 13 years old.

To understand her actions, it was important to give my mother a place in the film. She also had an arranged marriage at 17, which she accepted in order to escape from her village, where it’s difficult to survive for many girls.

“Red Moon” documents four years of the relationship between my aunt Tüncay and my mother. My aunt feared and held a deep grudge against my mother.

For the most part, the film dangled on a thin thread. My aunt Tüncay could have stopped everything and not continued. Until the end of editing, I was afraid she’d stop participating.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

TÖ: It was a long process of financing, more than two years. The film is supported by the Screen Brussels Film Commission. Belgian RTBF is co-producer.

The budget of the film is less than 200,000€ [about $225k USD], which is nothing when you are working with a professional team, even a small one.

Financing a documentary film is a long and difficult process. It’s important to have a good producer you can trust. I have this with Gilles De Valck from Cobra Films. He cares about women’s stories and was an important partner in the making of “Red Moon.”

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

TÖ: My first short documentary, “Our Wedding,” “opened my eyes,” as the Turkish saying goes. Cinema allows me to see the world. It is a window to the invisible and the unconscious. This first cinematic experience allowed me to understand why, in the heart of Europe, I was married at 16! Why I could not avoid an early pregnancy — out of ignorance and because my function as a bride was to be a mother — and why the adults who were supposed to protect me were constrained by certain traditions and were capable of the worst violence. I “saw” the women in my community and my Western girlfriends enslaved by the same mechanisms, I “saw” the marginalization of young single moms, like me, in our so-called evolved society.

Today, I feel the urgency of “opening my eyes” for my daughter, so she can be a little better prepared to be a woman in this world.

That first film opened my eyes to the woman I was and the one I wanted to be. Since then, I’ve been exploring cinematic reality to see better as a woman!

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

TÖ: The best advice: It’s not film school that will make you a filmmaker, it’s the experience. Pick up a camera and start filming.

The worst advice: Make your film alone.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

TÖ: For a woman, the very act of making movies is a revolution. Women are half of humanity. Today, the male gaze still largely dominates the representations of the world as well as the image of woman. I am convinced that women have a different perspective because women have different stories and their own particular relationships to the world. Women’s cinema is a Pandora’s box.

I would advise women directors to just make films — to transform representation, to reclaim our bodies and our image.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

TÖ: “The Three Rooms of Melancholia,” directed by Finland’s Pirjo Honkasalo. It’s a 2004 documentary about children during the war in Chechnya. For me, it’s an example of cinematic mastery, in both form and content. Cinema is an art where the aesthetic choice is a political commitment. In this film, the poetic and the political are one.

W&H: It’s been a little over a year since the reckoning in Hollywood and the global film industry began. What differences have you noticed since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?

TÖ: I’m thinking a lot about the feminists of the second wave. In America and then in Europe, the 1960s were fertile for revolution. It was the time of victories for women’s reproductive rights. Contraception and then the right to abortion transformed women’s relationships to their own bodies. For me, the emergence of movements like #TimesUp and #MeToo are reminiscent of this previous revolution. Like the video camera that had been picked up by women artists in the ’70s, the internet is an accessible and fascinating tool for women’s issues.

However, I’m suspicious of the buzz effect of internet movements. For me, the revolution has been going on for more than 40 years. Internet is an interface, which is great. But we still need to to question the structure that creates this interface. At the moment, I’m reading Susan Faludi’s “Backlash.” She wrote it in 1991, but it’s crazy how much it resonates today.