Loading Docs 2014 - Baba

Web (Full Length) – 2014

Subtitled ‘a conversation with my grandfather’, this animated short sees Joel Kefali (director of the music video for Lorde’s ‘Royal’) documenting memories of his Turkish 'Baba' arriving in 1951 Auckland. Sausage rolls, dances and the death penalty are animated via cut-out shapes, and scored to Baba’s colourful pidgin phrasing — “go to the hell!”. Noel Murray of US website The Dissolve praised the “ample artistry” of Kefali’s familial tribute. Baba was a part of Loading Docs: a series of low budget three-minute long films made for online release.

I thought of the film as being this smaller story that told a larger one about coming to New Zealand as an outsider and the clash of cultures of being Middle Eastern and Muslim, coming to a country which at that stage had very little interaction with people from that part of the world and had very little interaction with Islam.
– Joel Kefali, in an interview with The Wireless, 12 June 2014