Turkey

The three sisters Reyhan (20), Nurhan (16) and Havva (13) all live with their father in a remote village in central Anatolia. One after the other they were sent away to town to work as housemaids, but each of them has now returned. The last of the sisters to do so is Nurhan. She beat the local doctor’s son because he wet his bed every night. When Reyhan returned home pregnant, her father hastily married her off to the shepherd, Veysel. One day, the inebriated Veysel rises up against the village elder; his actions have dramatic consequences. More

Istanbul is in political chaos. Armed groups have taken control of the shantytowns. The police response is brutal. In the midst of this, two brothers are drawn into the violence. Kadir is released after a 15-year prison term and goes in search of his younger brother Ahmet. Meanwhile, Istanbul is in the grip of political violence. Hamza, a high-ranking police officer helps Kadir find a job as an informer. He collects garbage, checking to see whether it contains material related to bomb-making. Ahmet works at the municipality as part of a team responsible for destroying stray dogs. More

Samet, a young art teacher, is finishing his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in. Will his encounter with Nuray, herself a teacher, help him overcome his angst? More

Pretty Zehra and handsome Olgun spend most of their young lives working in a service station cafeteria near a lonely highway. Their monotonous work shifts are broken up only by sparks of naive expectations of a brighter future. Everything seems transient about their surroundings. The once important industrial area is now a faceless place of economic waste and unemployment. Most of the area's occupants have all escaped to the big city in search of opportunity. But Zehra, Olgun and their friends still remain, caught somewhere in between the past and an uncertain future. More

Six-year-old Yusuf has just begun attending primary school where he is learning how to read and write. His father, Yakup, is a beekeeper. He goes about his trade deep inside the woods where he hangs up his bee hives in the treetops of the highest trees. The mountain forest is a place of deep mystery to Yusuf and he derives great pleasure from accompanying his father there. One morning Yusuf tells his father about a dream he had the night before. Yakup turns on him curtly telling him never to share his dreams with others. The same day, Yusuf is asked to read out a text in front of the class. More

Emre, a young and dedicated prosecutor, is newly appointed to a small town hit by a water crisis and political scandals. After an initial welcome, he experiences an increasing number of tense interactions and is reluctantly dragged into local politics. When Emre forms a bond with the owner of the local newspaper pressure escalates under heated rumours. More

Beautifully drawn and meticulously observed, the film vividly recalls the cinema of Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni with its poetic use of landscape and the incisive, exquisitely visual rendering of loneliness, loss and the often-elusive nature of happiness. During a sweltering summer vacation on the Aegean coast, the relationship between middle-aged professor Isa (played by Ceylan himself) and his younger, television producer girlfriend Bahar (the luminous Ebru Ceylan, Ceylan’s real-life wife) brutally implodes. More

This May in the town seems to be warmer and gloomier than the previous years. Still, everyone seems to be happy despite their small worries and lives closed for any surprises. However, this happiness is a little disturbed by the arrival of Muzaffer who has made up his mind to shoot a film in this town where he had passed his childhood. "Clouds of May" tells the story of Muzaffer, who returns to his native town to make a movie. His father, Emin, is bent on saving the small forest he cultivates on his property from confiscation by the authorities. More

The woman is searching a face, but she doesn't say whose face it is or why she is after that face. She finds what she is looking for in the face of a local watchmaker and asks the photographer to find him. But the photographer looses track of both the watchmaker and the woman. He keeps searching and embarks on a strange, mysterious journey. During this trip in which dreams and reality are strangely mixed and all questions about life are abstractly asked, a bizarre game begins. More

What is it that the two men are after in Dead Lands in an indefinite near future? The global corporations have established cities and agricultural zones in areas where the climate is relatively good. These cities are populated by the elites, corporation’s executives, scientists, and those multiethnic immigrants who have been admitted after passing genetic compatibility tests. The immigrant masses struggle with hunger and epidemics. Professor Erol Erin (55), a seed genetics specialist, lives in a city protected from them by sophisticated armed forces and magnetic walls. More

Orhan Pamuk - Turkey's Nobel laureate for Literature - opens a museum in Istanbul. A museum that's a fiction: its objects trace a tale of doomed love in 1970's Istanbul. The film takes a tour of the objects as the starting point for a trip through love stories, landscapes and the chemistry of the city."Like many people, when I first visited Istanbul, I read Orhan Pamuk. From the very start, my view of the city was through the prism of his imagination. And I knew that Orhan had imagined a place called ‘The Museum of Innocence' and in 2008 had published a big novel of that name. More

A story of friendship, courage and a politically naive man’s transformation into someone painfully aware of the social realities in contemporary Turkey … Mehmet and Berzan, two young men from different regions of Turkey bond together as lower – class citizens in Istanbul. When Mehmet is unjustly arrested, his frightened roomates evict him and he loses his job. Mehmet’s loyalty to Berzan will eventually force him to disregard an uncompassionate bureaucracy and embark on a journey eastward across Turkey. More

Told from the perspective of two children, and in four parts which run parallel to seasons, KASABA describes relationships between members of a Turkish family in a small town. The first part is in a primary school where the family's 11 year old doughter is a pupil. It shows the social environment to which she has to adopt, and its difficulties. She faces with her feeling of shame and some merciless clues of life... The second part is in spring. We see the girl with her brother, who is four years younger, and their journey to the corn field where their family are waiting for them. More

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Life in a small town is akin to journeying in the middle of the steppes: the sense that "something new and different" will spring up behind every hill, but always unerringly similar, tapering, vanishing or lingering monotonous roads... More

Two sisters and a brother live in the center of İstanbul today. They are in their thirties and forties, and lead very different lives, self centered on their upper-middle class preoccupations. One day, a phone call brings them together on a voyage through Turkey’s suburbs and villages to the small town in the Black Sea mountains where they were born. Their aged mother, Nusret, has dissappered. More

25-year-old Sibel lives with her father and sister in a secluded village in the mountains of Turkey’s Black Sea region. Sibel is a mute, but she communicates by using the ancestral whistled language of the area. Rejected by her fellow villagers, she relentlessly hunts down a wolf that is said to be prowling in the neighbouring forest, sparking off fears and fantasies among the village women. There she crosses path with a fugitive. Injured, threatening and vulnerable, he is the first one to take a fresh look at her. More

SÜT - MILK is the second part of the Yusuf Trilogy, of which BAL - HONEY was the epilogue. Yusuf is in his twenties here and lives with his mother Zehra on the outskirts of a city in Anatolia. Together, they sell homemade products on the local market with the milk of their two cows. Business is getting worse because with increasing industrialization and the emergence of new neighbourhoods, people are buying more and more in new supermarkets. More

This restrained and realistic record of a personal crisis slowly but surely acquires allegorical dimensions. After a failed marriage about which he doesn’t want to speak, a young man, Selim, returns from Istanbul to his birthplace, Izmir – which just happens to be the birthplace of the filmmaker, who refers in his first full-length feature to autobiographical material as well as the state of the country. Selim doesn’t seem able to pick up where he left off. More

Sinan is passionate about literature and has always wanted to be a writer. Returning to the village where he was born, he pours his heart and soul into scraping together the money he needs to be published, but his father’s debts catch up with him.Bonus to view Interview Sarajevo Filmfestival 2018 More

A family dislocated when small failings blow up into extravagant lies battles against the odds to stay together by covering up the truth... In order to avoid hardship and responsibilities that would otherwise be impossible to endure, the family chooses to ignore the truth, not to see, hear or talk about it. But does playing “Three Monkeys” invalidate the truth of its existence? More

A photographer who is haunted by the feeling that the gap between his life and his ideals is growing finds himself obliged to put up in his apartment a young relative who has left behind his village looking for a job aboard a ship in Istanbul to go abroad. More

Aydin, a former actor, runs a small hotel in central Anatolia with his young wife Nihal with whom he has a stormy relationship and his sister Necla who is suffering from her recent divorce. In winter as the snow begins to fall, the hotel turns into a shelter but also an inescapable place that fuels their animosities… More

Yusuf is a poet, trapped between countryside and big city, who returns to his small hometown after five years after receiving the news of the death of his mother. Ayla, a distant relative, awaits him in his now run-down home. He makes friends with Ayla and the mother's absence causes an argument with his own self. More