Mine Pakel

History of Turkish Horror Cinema tries to take the first step in explaining how horror cinema started in Turkey, what prejudices it strives to break, and how film directors, producers and screenwriters see horror cinema.

Bekir makes a living by selling sacrificial sheep in his makeshift hut stuck among the plazas in Istanbul. One of the sheep that he has sold disappears. He has only two days to find the sheep or return the money.

Bekir makes a living by selling sacrificial sheep in his makeshift hut stuck among the plazas in Istanbul. One of the sheep that he has sold disappears. He has only two days to find the sheep or return the money.

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.

After decades of devastating war in Iraq, the horrors are still fresh in the minds of different generations. Their disturbing stories are filmed in a poetic style that also cautiously opens a door to beauty and contemplation.

Painter, photographer, jazz-lover, food enthusiast Ali Arif Ersen is suddenly struck down with locked-in syndrome and finds himself bedridden. Orchids in Fire captures the urge to create and explores the passion for life, the power of resilience and rebuilding one’s life after a tragedy.

Veysi lives in a village in the middle of Anatolia. One morning, when he goes to his barn with his son Mustafa, a pack of wolves attacks on his sheeps and Veysi loses most of them. Thus he wants a better gun to protect his herd, which is Mauser, ‘The king of the rifles’ as they say. Eventually he finds himself in a fight with the wolf and also his brother about their fathers inheritance.

A murder investigation is flipped inside out in Burak Çevik's second feature, a spellbinding and surprising work that questions whether we can ever truly understand criminal motives. We begin in the present as an unseen narrator recounts the assassination of his lover's disapproving mother, accompanied by hauntingly vacant images of urban alienation and garish city lights; we then flash back to witness the first encounter between the lovers-turned-accomplices, their mutual attraction and world-weariness emerging across a sleepless night and morning after. Çevik imbues the proceedings with a stylistic confidence and willingness to bend the conventions of cinematic form to arrive at a complex, gripping double meditation on love and death.