Discoveries from Turkey World Cinema

One day, a young man answers the door and is greeted by an unexpected visitor.

Şırnak is a Kurdish city on the border of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. In 2007, drama teacher Tayfur began recording candid interviews with children aged between 8 and 14. They were once enthusiastic, honest and full of hope for a brighter future. Today, such interviews are not even possible anymore. The school has been destroyed. Women's rights are fragile. People's mental health is deteriorating and self-confidence is lost. Bigger ambitions have faded. In 2016, war erupted on the streets of Şırnak.

Cabbar and a cursed family are drawn into the labyrinth of a mansion haunted by a dark legacy, a place where secrets and eerie entities have reigned for years. Cabbar is the last representative of a tradition of dhikr (remembrance of God) that dates back to the Ottoman era. His only weapons in his battle with the demonic realm are his talismanic armor and powerful dhikr. Ignoring his lawyer's warnings, Hasan moves into the mansion he has inherited. Soon, his daughter Elif hears children's whispers in the middle of the night, and his wife Esma sees bloody silhouettes. As the curtain of mystery in Number 303 is lifted, Cabbar will pay a heavy price for his struggle to save his family.

In this one-man show by Baran Aksan, poems by various poets are analyzed.

A biopic about Turkish-Armenian photojournalist Ara Güler.

Thousands of people from all over the city attack the Tenekeli Neighborhood, which no one wants to enter, 364 days a year, just one day a year. This only day when the walls between Roma and other segments of society disappear is Ederlezi, the most important for the Roma people, where the arrival of spring is celebrated.

A man is stuck on the border between two countries. He has jeopardised his whole livelihood by spending the last money he had on a herd of cows that he awaits coming from the war torn neighbouring country. Amidst the sounds of explosions and distressing announcements made by the border authorities, the man’s hopeful waiting for the cows, turns into the fear of losing everything.

The story of Alp and Deniz.

A man, which seems tired cause of 'what happened in the past', tries to realize his own meaningful memories.

BDSM scene in Turkey.

A lot of words have been said on women-men equality for many centuries. However there is a situation people don’t realize even though they know it very well.

When the pregnancy test of Eylül, a 27-year-old lawyer, comes back positive, it triggers the trauma of losing her parents as a child. As she tries to cope with this upheaval, she receives a mysterious package containing items from her childhood. This unexpected encounter with her past, following the pregnancy test, brings her childhood alter ego named "Haziran" to light. Haziran, a sympathetic girl full of dreams and excitement, wants to confront the adult Eylül with her disappointment and anger over what she has become after so many years. Eylül is drawn into a surreal and emotional confrontation with her childhood self. Through this symbolic reunion, she faces her deepest fears and regrets.

Does destiny chase the love or love chase the destiny?

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.

Adem Ekiz lives in Trabzon, Turkey, with his wife and 3 children. He is Muslim and his native language is Greek. He is playing "kemenche." Through his music, he silently breaks the chains between peoples by singing his traditional songs in both Turkish and Greek languages.

Who remembers the women that used to pick the greens in the fi elds where no one sowed the seeds, or watered them, or defi ned their borders by putting up fences? Gleaners, Dreams and Greens fi lls the absence of ‘aşefçi’ women at the bazaar named after them with a polyphonic whisper choir. Hevsel Gardens where ‘aşefçi’s used to pick herbs shed light on the history of the marketplace became invisible in time.

When a young Turkish immigrant arrives in San Francisco, she finds herself inside an evergrowing Balkan music scene and sets on a quest to explore how Bay Area has become such a hotbed for Balkan music, how it influenced the local music scene and how music travels across borders.

Hevidar is under compulsory education in a language different than her mother tongue. Hevidar has a homework to do.

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.

Trapped in a building for testing by his human creator, the artificial intelligence Hade must discover himself and reach his full potential to get out of the building.

El Hass focuses on the life of a family whose lives turn into a nightmare after being haunted by demons. Zeynep and Hakan are a happy couple with their children. However, the family's life turns into a nightmare when the demons are haunted. Zeynep, who has haunted the jinn realm due to the mistake she made in the past, has to face her past while trying to get rid of the nightmare she fell into.

Azaim focuses on the experiences of a village people who come into contact with jinn.

Hikmet and Salim are close friends whose lives aren’t going quite as planned. Salim, who has been working as an intern at a company for a long time, finally receives the long-awaited promotion news and becomes a manager. However, on the very day he thinks he has achieved his dreams, the company goes bankrupt, and he ends up with a huge debt. Meanwhile, Hikmet, who has fallen in love with Yağmur, has been waiting for the right moment to declare his love. Just when he seizes the opportunity to save Yağmur’s life, he gets beaten up by a group of vagrants. Frustrated by their misfortunes, the two friends decide to end their lives. But carrying out these decisions won’t be easy.

The fires that started on 28 July could only be brought under control on the 12th day. A total of 240 fires broke out in 47 provinces. 8 people died. 5 provinces, 18 districts and 99 villages were seriously injured in the fires. 31 thousand hectares of agricultural land, close to 100 thousand hectares of forest areas were burned. Nearly 5000 farm animals and thousands of forest animals died, and thousands more lost their habitats. Mirgün Cabas and the Gain news team were there.

With the immense interest of teenagers and children in football, Ertuğrulgazi Mesken Sports Club is established in 1971 in Bursa in the Ertuğrulgazi Mesken district. In 1975, Bursa S.C. is rival to the visiting Dinamo Kiev for a match. The young people of Mesken, impressed by the ideology and football of the Soviet team, rename their local team ’Dinamo Mesken.’ As political strife and armed conflicts rise by the end of the 1970s, pressure amounts, custodies and deaths taking place around the neighbourhood overwhelm the team and its players. The club is shut down based on political grounds in 1982. The players and members of the club suffer custody and torture. The massive impact of the military regime after the coup in 1982 that affected both the district and the team are told through the witness accounts of those who have lived through this exceptional period.

She attempts to escape her patterns.

The world has changed. So has what they watch...

A film about the plight of a young girl in a small village in eastern Turkey who is coerced to become a child-wife for an already married older man.

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.

Rıza and Sabit, who work in the funeral services of a rural municipality, set out for the burial of an unknown funeral. Encountering many setbacks along the way, Rıza and Sabit bring the body to the graveyard of the orphans at the end of the day.

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”.

An interdimensional adventure.

One day dancing crab realizes there is something off with the depressed crab. The ocean is calling for them.

The comedy that gives Rambo an inferiority complex.

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.

Ain't No Cinderellas! chronicles the struggle of domestic workers to form a union for women. In the film we see them fighting for their rights, trying to get the government to respond to their pleas for coverage by the Union and Collective Bargaining Law.

Mehmet Murat Ozyurt is a man who passes his days doing nothing. He goes out of his house in the mornings, spends time in the shopping malls and wanders around in various places of the city with no specific purpose. In the evenings he always goes to either an exhibition opening or a film premiere where he finds the opportunity to have a couple of drinks and socialize with his friends. Mehmet Murat whose days are always spent in similar ways sees himself as the dervish of modern times.