Yusuf Ölmez

Tuncel Kurtiz is an international actor who has worked in various countries such as Turkey, Germany, and Sweden throughout his fifty-year career. He has starred in countless works in cinema, stage and television and has received many awards, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. He has directed two documentaries and a feature-length fiction film. Kurtiz's acting performance ranges from popular melodramas to major plays such as Mahabharata (Peter Brook), encompassing many different genres and styles. As an actor, Kurtiz believes in the creative power of chaos: 'Chaos is the most difficult to create / Not a false chaos / Many things come out of chaos'. Through testimonies, film excerpts, and archive footage, this documentary reflects Tuncel Kurtiz's diverse body of artistic work in all its dimensions for the first time. In the background of this detailed portrait are Turkey's turbulent years and the reality of exile.

When a renowned film director, clashes with the young son of a house she's using as a filming location, a power struggle ensues, forcing the director to confront her own arrogance.

Cansu and Oguz, a couple in their mid-twenties, deeply love each other for many years. Oguz is a strong person who always supports and motivates his partner whereas Cansu’s love is inspiring for everyone around but she is always afraid about becoming distanced from Oguz. However, this fear unexpectedly turns into different feelings when her concerns become real in the most extreme way.

Alis, an Armenian woman in Turkey, returns to her summerhouse to find her surroundings gone. Urban change threatens her home. Haunted by childhood traumas, she resists, planting her plastic umbrella as a quiet yet firm defiance.

When a dysfunctional family’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, their repressed grievances with each other bubble to the surface.

Rifat is in the preparation process of a movie about strangers chatting at bus stops, together with his long-time friend and producer, Serhat. as Rifat gets more lonely and isolated, he reluctantly asks his brother in law for financial help. Rifat, who starts to face people around him even more closely as he does not get the reactions he expected during this process, gets lost in a vicious cycle in which he keeps changing the scenario for his film.

A young woman’s husband is mysteriously taken away from her at dawn. She tries to mourn by remembering him through objects and imitation but this leads to a destructive discovery of her desires towards the mysterious entities that took her husband away. She finds herself in a realistic limbo of unexpected desires.

A collection of stories from five women across different regions, generations, and beliefs in Türkiye. A four-generation family harvesting nuts in the Black Sea region; Aslı running a historic coffee business in Istanbul; Hira giving birth in the Aegean Sea; Hatice, an Alevi/Kurdish woman on the eastern high plains; and Arya fighting for transgender rights in Ankara. Stories of freedom, desire, and dreams shaped by the landscapes they inhabit.

Murat is a dedicated construction worker building a gargantuan wall for a boss whom none of the workers has ever seen. After the departure of his colleague, Ali, and his relocation on the other side of the wall imposed by Yavuz, the boss' right-hand, Murat sinks into a whirlwind of tension that leads him to struggle to meet the man he works for.

What is the role of an ethnographic filmmaker as an outsider and student of a culture? Is it about representing, demonstrating, and reflecting or exposing, participating, and transposing? Although these are not binary terms of the historic discussions in anthropology, they share a lot to be experimented through shared cine-anthropology and sensory multimodal ethnography.

Wind from the East (or 2021) is a film about the movement at Bogazici University, considered by many to be the best university in the country, and its relation to the growing tyranny in Turkey. Highlighting the plight of women and LGBTQ citizens who are experiencing not only the rapid loss of their freedoms but what amounts to a fatwa when and if they dare to speak out against their government, the documentary aims to share the stories of Turkish citizens operating on the front lines in the battle for human rights, while expressing the need for art as a first line of defense against the totalitarianism that is quickly creeping westward.