Turkey

Quote:
Winner of the prestigious Fipresci Award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, CLIMATES is internationally acclaimed writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan s sublime follow-up to his Cannes multi-award winner DISTANT. 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. Back in Istanbul that fall, Isa rekindles a torrid affair with a previous lover. But when he learns that Bahar has left the city for a job in the snowy East, he follows her there to win her back. Boasting subtly powerful performances, heart-stoppingly stunning cinematography (Ceylan s first work in high definition) and densely textured sound design, CLIMATES is the Turkish filmmaker’s most gorgeous rumination yet on the fragility and complexity of human relationships. (amazon.com)Read More »

Quote:
A News Channel employee Hasret, has been seeing the same nightmare for some time. Through recurring nightmares, a question creeps into her mind: Is it possible that her parents were not killed in a traffic accident twenty years ago but have died in some other, horrific way?Read More »

This film was inspired by a chapter from the Quran. It is a post-apocalyptic story set in a world where those that survive, are divided between the remnants of cities and agricultural zones. Both of these factions are ruled by corporations and populated by elites. In the areas called Dead Lands, genetically incompatible immigrants suffer from drought and epidemics.Read More »

Suat, who still lives with his mother, father and sister, works at his father’s store in his spare time after practicing as goalkeeper for Esnaf Spor, an amateur football team. Approaching his 30s, Suat is in love with Nurten, the neighborhood beauty, but she has never responded to any of the many secret letters he has sent to her. The whole neighborhood’s greatest wish is for Esnaf Spor to win the amateur football league championship, which would also give them a shot at becoming a professional club. The opportunity to go professional gets the small-time powers that be into action. Serkan, a player who was hurriedly transferred to Esnaf Spor has his first sexual experience with Aynur, a prostitute of living in a house outside the town. Serkan’s transfer affects the girls of the neighborhood more than the team… (movies.yahoo.com)Read More »

Mommy, I’m scared

What’s a human anyway…
This is the question the film explores. Through the streets of Istanbul, echoing with seagull cries and boat whistles, through the people in their homes who, scream, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, lip to lip, hand in hand, fist to fist, eye to eye, cheek to cheek: Ali and his father Rasih… Neriman the tailor and her son Keten… Ipek with her baby in her belly… The doorman Riza, his wife Selvi and their son Cetin… The neighborhood butcher, Kemal… Neriman’s dog, Cakir. Ipek’s gymnast roommate Umit… Ex-boxer Aytekin and his friend Zambak…Read More »

Derya (Selma Ergeç) works in a bank’s call center to support her elderly mother. One day her life is suddenly turned upside down as she begins to hear a strange voice whispering to her. The source of the voice is a mystery and it tells her things and facts noone else would know.Read More »

Driven by the desire to see his son get an education and rise out of their level of abject poverty, a peasant father takes his boy to Istanbul to look for the advantages that were missing in his life. He hopes to find a good job so he can send his son to school, but as time goes by it seems they can barely make their way around the city and stay out of debt, let alone get ahead. Besides, the police always seem to be after them for one thing or another. Director Ali Özgentürk was arrested before he completed shooting this film, with no reason given for his arrest — as the content of his film suggests, this is not an unusual occurrence. He was later released.
— Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide.Read More »

Quote:
In spite of the palpable ubiquity of misogyny across many diverse quarters of the Arabic world, filmic representation of the Middle Eastern female subaltern often feels reductive, and at its most egregious it can seem a subtle endorsement of the very behavior it ostensibly means to penetrate and vilify. Though not quite an unintentional apologia for sexism, the Turkish film Bliss is an illustration of how inadequate fiction can be at tackling the über-sober topic of sexual victimization. Mere hours before the movie’s first scene, young adult Meryem (Özgü Namal) is brutally violated and left for dead on a pastoral beach adjacent to her small village; despite the glaringly nonconsensual nature of the forced coupling she’s endured, her community ostracizes her as a strumpet per tradition and has her ushered out of town to be executed by Cemal (Murat Han), a male cousin returning from military service. In the first two acts Cemal wrestles with his own demons (mostly yawningly recondite combat flashbacks) as he struggles to maintain cultural dignity at the cost of committing what he clearly views to be senseless murder, and Meryem is a tangle of frayed nerves that we suspect obscure some painfully trite twists (we’re correct).Read More »

Why Can’t I Be Tarkovsky? (Neden Tarkovski Olamiyorum…) by Murat Düzgünoğlu (2014, 95 min.). Bahadır, an aspiring 35-year-old director, earns his living making cheap television films inspired by the stories behind Anatolian folk songs. His dream is to make films like his idol, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, though it seems that everything stands between him and his ambition.

This low-key, tragicomic story presents us with a glimpse of the life of Bahadir, director of TV movies, who dreams of making artistically ambitious films like those of his idol, Andrei Tarkovsky.Read More »