Discoveries from Turkey World Cinema

This is the story of Muhammed Faris, the first Syrian to go to outer space. He is forced to flee his country, as his ideas for a free Syria make him a target.

The theme of outsiderdom anchors Güler’s In Limbo – a series of intimate vignettes that play with subversion. In one scene a masculine group is gathered on the shore talking about hooking up with girls, before one person jumps in the water to reveal top surgery scars. In another, a belly dancer twists in the desert, kicking up dust and sand before lifting their veil to reveal a moustache.

A weird man meets a weird girl for a weird plan.

Watching the Life.

A cheating girlfriend is about to face the real life.

A documentary about the last period of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic.

This documentary presents the past and present of Istanbul’s famed Grand Bazaar, whose history spans nearly five centuries. The film offers an intimate portrait of the bazaar through the perspective of a sherbet seller who has walked its streets for forty years, capturing the rhythms of daily life and the continuity of tradition within one of the city’s most enduring cultural spaces.

The story of the last nine days of Zeki Müren, an artist born at the peak of his career, who aimed to die at the peak of his career.

People who have to leave where they live, let their photo taken for the last time in front of a backdrop. The photographer gives the photographs to everyone and they move away from the backdrop. "The Photograp"h takes a glimpse into the lives of all refugees who are forced to leave their country, from the point of view of the last moment they were together and happy. In doing so, the director who does not use any dialogues and thus does not offer any description, reveals his discourse on a global basis.

Being a world citizen is enough to befriend and when a pair of cleats represents true friendship

According to some sources of Ancient Greek and Roman historiography, the "mythical" Amazon Female Warriors originated in Pontus, a location which is today a part of Turkey's Black Sea Region. Inspired and compiled from the texts of "History" by Herodotus, "Iliad" by Homer, "Promotheus Bound" by Aesychylus ,"Argonautica" by Appollonius Rhodius, "Library of History" by Diodorus of Sicily, "The Fall of Troy" by Quintus of Smyrna, "The Gothic History" by Jordanes, "Geography" by Strabo and "Hippocratic Collection" by BC Pseudo-Hippocrates, the film ANDROKTONES retells the Amazons Female Warrior myths in the Turkish language, through the contradicting words of a female and male narrator. Set in a touristic Amazon theme park built in the Turkish Black Sea city of Samsun, ANDROKTONES takes a plunge at how the historical legacy of the Amazons is still very much subjective, and how the suffocating patriarchal voice defies time, language or geography.

12 episodes documentary about Turkish political history focused on period between 1993 and 2002.

Explicitly discussing its own production and censorship at the hands of Turkish officials, belit sag’s Ayhan and me is an incisive, Farocki-like examination of the power of images, the roles and responsibilities of representation and sanctioned history-making, and the charged relationship between art and state control.

The film centers on the topics of cyber warfare and cyber activism, which have not been previously addressed in Turkish cinema. Claiming to comprehensively address its subject matter with contributions from numerous experts, the film 'Red!' does not shy away from examining RedHack—undoubtedly the most prominent group in Turkey when it comes to cyber activism—and its actions from different angles.

Like the process of making a baglama, it is the story of people who, despite all the obligations, all the memorisations, all the pressures they have experienced from childhood to adulthood, have defended their beliefs and culture.

A biopic about Turkish-Armenian photojournalist Ara Güler.

The story of Alp and Deniz.

Two young women go camping together. They watch a film they shouldn't watch. There's an evil spirit that comes out of the film they watch.

It is a film about one of the ethnic cleansing in the Balkan Peninsula, which took place in in Bulgaria. The consequences of it are lasting till now. In the mid 80-ies the Bulgarian communist authorities started to forcefully change the Turkish names of about one million ethnic Turks into Bulgarian ones, in an attempt to resolve the ethnic problems that had been piled up for years. The film tells the stories about three women and their divided families. Each of them experienced in her own way this tragedy.

Turkish capital Ankara’s district Evren is home to a community of seasonal workers. The workers, who come to Evren with their families to harvest onions, are trying to cope with various difficulties while holding on to life.

A short film with the developed idea of "chat is not made only through the internet the 'Turkish Chat' never..." and by the humorist act of narrating the mixture of the graffiti and recent chat culture. The whole movie is prepared in English with the idea of international film festivals. When a young man goes out of the underground, he wants to go to "the water closet" but all "the water closets" and urinals are busy. After a few minutes, a man goes out of "the water closet". A young man gets into that water closet. After he enters that water closet, he replies to one of the messages written there, and all his world changes from that moment. Afterwards, he has only one aim to look at his place in the water closet. It's a duty like looking at his e-mails. Also, even "the special songs" that he listens to in the underground don't help him to give up on this strange game. But an inevitable end is waiting for him in this game. Every beauty has an end.

Female farmers describe the olive harvest, their struggles with the soil and climate, and the traditional methods used in olive harvesting for centuries, verbally and physically. They convey their feelings as women who do not give up on agriculture and struggle despite the climatic conditions, and they take the audience around their gardens and introduce their trees.

Blue Minor is a short story of a night that contains the existential pain, sadness and madness of an artist.

The film which is about the fire in the girls’ dormitory in Adana’s Aladağ district on November 29, 2016, tells the struggle of poor people living in the villages of the region for education, shelter, life and justice.

Ferdi, who went to Germany with his father years ago, now wants to return to his homeland. He marries his girlfriend Ayten and returns to his country. He begins living with his mother and uncle, who have been waiting for him for years. However, his relationship with his uncle, to whom he has been sending money for years, deteriorates. Because he did not marry his uncle's daughter, his uncle and cousins become hostile toward Ferdi. While Ferdi and Ayten try to establish a new life together, his cousins will seek revenge against him.

Cilali Ibo, who runs the shoe shine salon, inherits it from his grandfather. There is also a mansion on the heritage list. An inheritance lawyer collaborates with a gang. The gang tries to kill Ibo and prevent him from reaching mansion.

Lavinya, a mysterious young girl with a questionable past who complains about the meaninglessness of life, has to make new decisions about herself and her future. But she has no idea what to do. One night she suddenly meets a charismatic young man who changes her perspective on life.

Mankind has made many efforts to understand what has been happening in nature, and for those phenomena that it wasn’t able to grasp, it created symbols in order to materialize them. Today, any drawing on the body is named a tattoo. This documentary is a pursuit of the secret meaning behind the tattoos of Şanlıurfa, known as “deq, daki vesm, döğün”.

Fallon, a gay MI6 agent, attends a party in London to meet his lover — only for the man to suddenly collapse and die in his arms, poisoned. Branded a traitor and exposed as a mole within the agency, Fallon is forced to flee. He escapes to Istanbul, where he hides out, waiting for contact with his partner Alina, unsure of who to trust or what remains of his identity. Told entirely through male whispering ASMR, the film unfolds as a hypnotic, slow-burning spy meditation that replaces action with intimacy, memory, and sound. The first entry in Alexander Roman’s experimental trilogy, I Am A Spy: Istanbul reframes espionage through a queer lens, exploring loss, betrayal, and emotional isolation in a genre that rarely makes room for vulnerability — let alone queer male desire.

The Wall that Separates Us Describes the process of three brothers who quarantined together at home because their families are abroad and become more and more trampled at home with their curfew and revealing their secrets.