Ercan Yılmaz

Loosely inspired by Stefan Zweig’s novella, in which playing chess is depicted as a means of surviving fascism, The Avalanche recounts the events of the Armenian genocide, still contested by the Turkish state. Pinar Öğrenci uses archives and present-day footage of the region to uncover the traumas left by the Armenian people on their landscape and their memories.

Eylem is a young woman. She lives in a small Kurdish town and works at a rug workshop. She thinks her nose is too large, and dreams of having cosmetic surgery. However, one of her brothers has joined the political organization, and many others from the same town have died in clashes. Will Eylem manage to find a way out of this challenging dilemma?

When a nationalistic wealthy landowner's idealist son falls for a non-muslim prostitute, he finds himself in a conflict between his feelings and politics under the shadow of the events of September 6th-7th in 1955, the Istanbul Pogrom.

During the period of the Wealth Tax, where many non-Muslims in Turkey were forced to pay higher taxes, often in an arbitrary and unrealistic way. Nimet and Durmuş migrate from Niğde to Istanbul and take shelter with Durmuş's friend Bekir, who finds Durmuş a job at the inn. However, making a living by serving as a porter is not in line with Durmuş's ambitions. He wants everything Halit Bey has, the inn owner. Halit Bey begins to dispose of his property in order to pay the tax stipulated to his beloved wife Nora, who was treated in a nursing home. Wealth Tax has begun to affect everyone's destiny.

The story of a young man who spends his entire life trying to heal the wound his stepmother left in his soul.

A triptych of literary adaptations explores past, present and future in rural Turkey. “Düne Özlem” (from Hulki Aktunç’s Bir Yergöstericinin Hayatı): A once-famed traveling critic returns after years to the cinema that launched his career—and finds it unrecognizably transformed. “Bugüne Özlem” (from Kemal Tahir’s Arabacı): A horse-drawn cart driver picks up two stranger women en route to a village—unaware they intend to marry him off to their spinster relative. “Yarına Özlem” (from Zeyyat Selimoğlu’s Bıldırcınlar): An old captain haunted by a fatal shipwreck readies quail-hunting with his grandson, even as his daughter-in-law waits in vain for her migrant husband to return from Germany. Each segment poignantly probes longing— for what was, what is, and what might yet come.