Yesim Ustaoglu

When an aging matriarch starts showing signs of dementia, her dysfunctional family in Istanbul must navigate a minefield of unresolved issues to care for her.Read More »

Mehmet, a young Turkish man newly migrated from the village Tire, takes a job searching for water leaks below the surface of the streets of Istanbul. Due to a strange set of events, he is mistaken for a Kurd, imprisoned, and brutally beaten. Upon his release a week later, he becomes an outcast marked as a Kurd, losing his apartment, his job, and eventually his girl friend, Arzu. When a Kurdish friend, Berzan is killed in a street protest triggered by a hunger strike, Mehmet takes a trek to return the body to Berzan’s home village near the Iraqi border, and learns why so many Kurds are refugees.Read More »

Ayse/Eleni who is a member of a Greek family in Turkey is forced to immigrate from Trabzon to Mersin in her early ages. However, the events that happen cause her to face her own past.Read More »

Kemal is a plainclothes policeman investigating a suicide whose face has been obliterated. He becomes obsessed with the real appearance of the dead man.Read More »

Quote:
Two Turkish women one oppressed by sexist traditions and one liberated by modern mores, have more in common than it would seem.Read More »

Synopsis
“Clair Obscur” is the psychological dance of two women who are deprived of and distanced from their natural right to mature and discover themselves, to love and be loved, and to sustain a real relationship of their choosing. The social cost of these psychological wounds reverberates from micro to macro levels throughout society, rotting it from within.Read More »

There isn’t much that can prepare you for the drastic second-half turn of “Araf,” an often-gorgeous drama playing in the Main Slate at the New York Film Festival. Evocative and somewhat alien in equal measure, “Araf” takes place in a withered Turkish countryside that might as well be another planet. We see the economic strife through the lava runoff that occurs in the very first shot of the film, lumbering out of a cauldron, spilling out onto the land. Though fairly mundane within the lives of the characters (one of whom is discussing sex in voiceover as the orange-red substance burns all that lies underneath it), it’s an introduction that rivals the eye-opening early shots of Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” though while it was that film’s high point, here it’s an example of a world dying while underdeveloped, neglected, managed and monitored by day laborers barely getting by on their own.Read More »