Satruday, April 7

David Batty: “We made this film after reviewing tons of archival material”

Vibrant documentary My Generation from the “Documentary Time with NTV” section tackles a wide range of themes from fashion to cinema and music without staying outside of politics. The director David Batty attended the film’s screening at Beyoğlu Sineması and answered the questions from the audience: “This film came about with three people coming together. The first is Michael Caine, the second one is the producer Simon Fuller and the third is me. In the early 1960s, there was a social revolution in England. And this revolution came from the proletariat to which Michael also belonged. This period of revolution allowed them to be actors, musicians or photographers, meaning that they were able to become what they always wanted; and this was happening for the first time in the history of England.”

Batty said that the starting point of the film was Michael’s story and Simon’s passion for music, and added: “My story is no different. I was born in 1962. Both my parents belonged to the working class. That was normal at the time. We reviewed a ton of archival material and made this film by putting them together. It took us about six years reviewing this archive material which was about 1500 hours in total. We did a thorough scan of the whole archive in order to find the footage that would project this social transformation.”

As a final note, Batty said that the footage was personal material shot by the people themselves: “A lot of films have been made about the 1960s. We wanted this to be different. We only had a difference in opinion when it came to which music we were going to use because there was so much music in the 1960s.”