Some artists dream of their work reaching the world. İlhami Tunç Gençer just kept making films until the world had no choice but to pay attention – nearly 300 festival screenings later, it clearly worked. Born in Istanbul in 1984, he studied graphic design at Haliç University, where a photography prize was just the warm-up act before animation took over his life entirely. And what animation. Surrealist, raw, and deeply strange in the best possible way, his films have collected awards across continents, including the jury’s special prize at Colombia’s Cinenautas Defilm festival, and earned him fan mail from directors like Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brent Green, and Szabolcs Hajdu. Not a bad inbox to have. Alongside his films, he paints, writes automatist texts, and runs Dalga Avangard, the avant-garde collective he founded himself, because apparently one creative life wasn’t enough. At Kinomural, he brings work rooted in surrealism and the subconscious, the kind that gets under your skin and stays there.
The Pain Of Tomorrow is a portrait of the dystopia we’ve built with our own hands: the wreckage we leave behind, the inheritance we’re preparing for tomorrow. And yet, for all its weight, it was made with the lightness of a diary entry: no sketches, no safety net, no plan. Pure automatism, the way the Surrealists always intended it. İlhami works the way a free jazz musician plays, not despite the chaos, but straight through it, following a methodology that turns improvisation itself into a craft. The result is something that feels both inevitable and completely alive.
