documentary film

Whistled Language Documentary

Completed 2019

Glydrs

Agency

Great Big Story (CNN)

About Project

For three centuries, farmers living in the remote mountains of northern Turkey have communicated great distances by whistling. It’s a language called kuş dili that is still used to this day, though fewer people are learning it in the age of the cell phone. It’s also known as bird language, for obvious reasons. Muazzez Köçek lives in Kuşköy, and she is the best whistler in her village. Muazzez shows us how she uses varied pitch frequencies and melodies to translate Turkish vocabulary into whistles with meaning.