History & Society Lens

Takes (1453)

• Among Family (Aile Arasında)

  Aile Arasında is a comedy, but underneath lies the idea that a marriage is a matter between two families, not just two people. A daughter… Read more →

• The European Side (Avrupa Yakası)

  The comedy of Avrupa Yakası actually feeds on an increasingly visible class divide in Istanbul. The tension between a young woman who longs… Read more →

• Ayla: The Daughter of War

  Ayla takes a chapter seldom remembered today, Turkey's presence in the Korean War, and tells it through an ordinary sergeant's eyes… Read more →

• Bergen

  Beyond being a portrait of an arabesque singer, Bergen brings back one of the names that became a symbol of violence against women in… Read more →

• Pocket Hercules: Naim Süleymanoglu (Cep Herkülü: Naim Süleymanoğlu)

  Pocket Hercules widens the scope of the sports biopic by weaving it together with the forced renaming campaign against Bulgaria's Turks.… Read more →

• The Bandit (Eşkıya)

  Eşkıya is regarded as the turning point from Yeşilçam to modern Turkish cinema, and not only because of its box office. Baran, released… Read more →

• Hababam Class (Hababam Sınıfı)

  The film's background is as interesting as the laughs in the foreground. Censorship long kept Rıfat Ilgaz's 1957 novel off the screen; in… Read more →

• Polite Feyzo (Kibar Feyzo)

  It would be unfair to dismiss Kibar Feyzo as just a village comedy. The film tackles the landlord system and the bride-price custom through… Read more →

• Magnificent Century (Muhteşem Yüzyıl)

  Muhteşem Yüzyıl is one of the productions that reignited the debate over what a historical series should be. Its free interpretation of… Read more →

• Müslüm

  Müslüm is as much a reflection on why arabesque spoke to millions as it is one artist's life story. The road of a man the public embraced… Read more →

• The Fall of Leaves (Yaprak Dökümü)

  Yaprak Dökümü brought a question Turkey had long been discussing, how migration and urbanisation reshape the family, to television's widest… Read more →

• Dad's Money (Baba Parası)

  Baba Parası's premise works like a cross-section of society: rich and poor, a professor and an uneducated man, villagers and city dwellers… Read more →

• Dance with the Jackals 4 (Çakallarla Dans 4)

  The film opens with four friends from Fikirtepe moving in together because of money trouble, a starting point that shows, lightly, how the… Read more →

• The Stranger in My Pocket (Cebimdeki Yabancı)

  The film holds up a mirror to an age in which the smartphone has become the black box of private life. The phones seven old friends lay on… Read more →

• Grandpa's Plug (Dedemin Fişi)

  Dedemin Fişi turns a very familiar Turkish scene into comedy: siblings scattered far and wide for years who gather again in their hometown… Read more →

• Deliha 2

  After a first film focused on her love life, Zeliha now turns her compass towards a career, a small but meaningful shift. In Turkish… Read more →

• Sour Apples (Ekşi Elmalar)

  The most interesting thing about Ekşi Elmalar is its line through time and place: the story begins in Hakkari in the late 1970s and reaches… Read more →

• Is Enes Batur a Dream or Reality? (Enes Batur Hayal mi Gerçek mi?)

  This film brings a very defining question of its time to the screen: for a young person, university or the dream of success on YouTube?… Read more →

• For the Two of Us (İkimizin Yerine)

  The film centres on a young woman trapped in the repetitive life her family imposes, and in doing so touches on the generational and gender… Read more →

• Husband Factor: Resurrection (Kocan Kadar Konuş: Diriliş)

  The film uses humour to open up the fear of what people will say and the traditional mould for Turkish girls. Having Efsun be the one who… Read more →

• Cologne Republic (Kolonya Cumhuriyeti)

  Kolonya Cumhuriyeti pokes fun at the local politics of a small town. Mayor Peker Mengen, elected on promises that will be hard to keep, is… Read more →

• Osman Marketing (Osman Pazarlama)

  Osman is a small trader in a modest Istanbul neighbourhood, selling goods he brings in from the Far East while looking for investors for… Read more →

• Recep İvedik 6

  The film's starting point comes from a very particular slice of Anatolia: a truckers' association and a dried-bean festival in Konya. That… Read more →

• The Song of Our Village (Bizim Köyün Şarkısı)

  The film follows a family that moves from Istanbul to a village, seen through children's eyes. The tension between a big-city dream and… Read more →

• Wolf (Börü)

  Börü tells the night of 15 July 2016 through the eyes of a special operations team. That night in recent history is still vivid in… Read more →

• Inferno (Cehennem)

  The film uses Europe's cultural heritage as a thriller map: from Florence to Dante and on to Istanbul. For a Turkish viewer, what stands… Read more →

• 125 Years Memory

  Ertuğrul 1890 combines two real events to look at the historical roots of Turkish-Japanese friendship: the Ottoman frigate that sank off… Read more →

• My Brother 2 (Kardeşim Benim 2)

  Kardeşim Benim 2 touches an interesting social line through the distance between a famous singer and the father of the woman he wants to… Read more →

• Losers' Club on the Road (Kaybedenler Kulübü Yolda)

  Kaybedenler Kulübü Yolda is one of those films that uses Kadıköy almost as an identity: the story begins and ends there. The radio duo's… Read more →

• Valley of the Wolves: Homeland (Kurtlar Vadisi Vatan)

  The film takes the 15 July 2016 coup attempt, a still-vivid event of recent history, into a fictional frame. Productions like this are… Read more →

• Precious Life (Nadide Hayat)

  After her husband's death, Nadide decides to make up for the mistakes of her youth, going first back to school and then out to sea. The… Read more →

• Love, Surreal and Odd (Tatlım Tatlım)

  Tatlım Tatlım traces the stages of a relationship, from beginning to end, through four couples who meet at the same party. The text became… Read more →

• Vizier's Finger (Vezir Parmağı)

  Vezir Parmağı takes the Ottoman Empire, spread over three continents and counting people of many lands and cultures as its subjects, and… Read more →

• Fork in the Road (Yol Ayrımı)

  Mazhar Kozanlı is a businessman who does not shy from harsh methods to grow the textile empire inherited from his father; the film works… Read more →

• The Wild Pear Tree (Ahlat Ağacı)

  A young would-be writer finishes university, returns to his Anatolian village and goes looking for money to print his first book, only to… Read more →

• My Mother (Annem)

  A girl who leaves a small village for university and drifts away from both her village and her mother: a familiar story that recalls… Read more →

• My Mother's Wound (Annemin Yarası)

  Set in the shadow of the Bosnian War, the film reminds us that war lasts beyond the front line, inside families and in questions of… Read more →

• My Father (Babam)

  A father's years of failing to accept his child with an intellectual disability offers a frame for questioning social attitudes toward… Read more →

• Crazy Love (Deli Aşk)

  Putting an ice-cream seller from Kahramanmaraş at its centre, the film carries a local tradesman into the language of romantic comedy; an… Read more →

• All Because of Love (Her Şey Aşktan)

  Pelin, a cashier and shelf attendant in a shopping mall, rushes through wedding preparations without sparing expense, and the breakup that… Read more →

• The Con (Ketenpere)

  A background extra working at a casting company run by a relative takes the blame for a financial crime the relative was involved in and… Read more →

• Burning Days (Kurak Günler)

  The ban on groundwater in Yanıklar turns an infrastructure problem into a fight over interests and power. The mayor defends his piped-water… Read more →

• About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne)

  A young teacher doing compulsory service in an unknown village in eastern Anatolia dreams of a transfer to Istanbul: the story brings to… Read more →

• Malazgirt 1071

  Malazgirt is remembered as a turning point in Anatolian history, and the film, based on real events, tells of the battle fought in 1071… Read more →

• Yellow Letters (Gelbe Briefe)

  Two artists from the Ankara theatre world lose their jobs and livelihoods overnight through an arbitrary intervention by officials; the… Read more →

• You Are My Everything (Sen Benim HerŞeyimsin)

  A man tossed between day jobs and passing relationships in Çıralı moves to Istanbul and finds work for the sake of his little daughter… Read more →

• Forgive Me (Beni Affet)

  The series opens with obstacles facing families whose children fall in love, then spreads into a wide web of households. Themes such as… Read more →

• The Pit (Çukur)

  Çukur portrays an Istanbul neighbourhood run by its own rules and long protected by a noble mafia family. Blood ties, loyalty and power… Read more →

• Diriliş: Ertuğrul

  The series follows the Kayı tribe's search for a homeland in thirteenth-century Anatolia, drawn from the life of Ertuğrul Gazi, and it… Read more →

• Doctors (Doktorlar)

  Following young surgeons in training at one of Turkey's best-known hospitals, the series also shows class and origin: Zenan, the only… Read more →

• Bandits Will Not Rule the World (Eşkıya Dünyaya Hükümdar Olmaz)

  Eşkıya portrays an Istanbul where the neighbourhood's own code counts for more than the formal order. Friendship, loyalty, debt and honour… Read more →

• Karadayi

  The series is set in 1970s Istanbul and deals with the conflict between the courts, influential interest groups and family honour. The Kara… Read more →

• Kırgın Çiçekler 1

  The series puts young people on the margins of society at its centre: girls raised in an orphanage, their longing for a family and their… Read more →

• Tide (Medcezir)

  A story built on class difference: Yaman, raised on the edge of Istanbul, starts a new life with a lawyer's family and meets the wealthy… Read more →

• Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem

  The series tells the era known in Ottoman history as the Sultanate of Women through the journey of Anastasia, abducted and brought to the… Read more →

• As Time Goes By (Öyle Bir Geçer Zaman Ki)

  Set in 1960s Istanbul, the series uses the family of a ship captain to show the period's family order, gender roles and changing city life.… Read more →

• World of Lies (Yalan Dünya)

  Through two families living side by side in Istanbul's Cihangir district, the series sets two opposite Turkish ways of life against each… Read more →

• Istanbul Tales (Anlat İstanbul)

  This film sets the rosy world of fairy tales against the unseen, worn side of Istanbul and looks at those living on the social margins. The… Read more →

• Love Doesn't Understand Words (Aşk Laftan Anlamaz)

  Hayat, the daughter of a Giresun fisherman, looking for work in Istanbul rather than going back to the village to be married off by her… Read more →

• Separation

  Ayrılık treats family, honour and gender norms through the story of a woman caught between two cultures. Her relatives shunning Umay when… Read more →

• Remember, My Dear (Hatırla Sevgili)

  The real strength of this series is that it runs a private love story alongside the political history of the late 1950s to 1980. Seeing the… Read more →

• Life Knowledge (Hayat Bilgisi)

  Hayat Bilgisi treats the tension between rote and creative education inside a school comedy. Afet being tossed from school to school across… Read more →

• Bride from Istanbul (İstanbullu Gelin)

  A young İstanbul woman marrying into a long-established, tradition-minded family makes the tension between city and tradition concrete… Read more →

• Valley of the Wolves (Kurtlar Vadisi)

  It would be too narrow to read Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves) only as a mafia series. From its 2003 debut it drew attention for… Read more →

• Kuruluş: Osman

  The series is set in thirteenth-century Anatolia around the Kayı tribe, and tells of a clan's effort to found an independent principality… Read more →

• That Life Is Mine (O Hayat Benim)

  A child raised among servants and a rich father's mansion: the series sets up class difference head-on. The lie of the poor and jealous… Read more →

• The seat of power: Abdulhamid (Payitaht Abdülhamid)

  The series covers the last thirteen years of Abdul Hamid II's reign, 1896 to 1909: the Greco-Ottoman War, land claims over Palestine, the… Read more →

• You Are My Homeland (Vatanım Sensin)

  In this series the last years of the Ottoman Empire, the occupation of İzmir and the War of Independence are followed through one family… Read more →

• Ward 72 (72. Koğuş)

  The film depicts a prison ward in the dark years when the Second World War cast its shadow over Turkey. Based on Orhan Kemal's impressions… Read more →

• Mother (Anne)

  Adapted from the Japanese series Mother, Anne brings a subject that is too often ignored, child abuse, to the centre of mainstream… Read more →

• Those in the Back Row (Arka Sıradakiler)

  Arka Sıradakiler takes its name from the students in the back row whom everyone has long given up on, and that choice is a social… Read more →

• Asmalı Konak

  By centring on the encounter between a modern young woman from Istanbul and a family firmly bound to tradition, Asmalı Konak brings an… Read more →

• My Name Is Gultepe (Benim Adım Gültepe)

  The most valuable idea in Benim Adım Gültepe is treating a neighbourhood of 1980s İzmir as a lead character. Gülümser, trying to look after… Read more →

• Do not worry for me (Benim İçin Üzülme)

  The most interesting thing about the series is how it sets deep-rooted Black Sea families against a young woman who arrives from the east… Read more →

• Our Story (Bizim Hikaye)

  Adapting Shameless for Turkey raises the question of how poverty is portrayed on screen. In Bizim Hikaye, a mother who walks out, an… Read more →

• Bodrum Tale (Bodrum Masalı)

  The series follows a wealthy family's fall into a modest Bodrum house after the bankruptcy of a hotel-chain owner whose family believed he… Read more →

• What Is Fatmagül's Crime? (Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne?)

  Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? asks its real question in the title itself: who is actually to blame? Through the story of a young woman attacked in a… Read more →

• Conquest 1453 (Fetih 1453)

  Fetih 1453 builds the conquest of Istanbul around the story of Ulubatlı Hasan and centres on the resolve of the young Mehmed II, back on… Read more →

• Filinta

  Billed as television's first Ottoman crime show, Filinta opens up an interesting space: crime, justice and policing in the imperial… Read more →

• Hercai

  Hercai, adapted from Sümeyye Ezel's novel of the same name, sets its story in Midyat and puts a feud between two prominent families at its… Read more →

• Black Rose (Karagül)

  In telling the secrets inside a family that looks strong and respectable from the outside, Karagül raises familiar questions about family… Read more →

• Kebab Connection

  The film opens a funny yet warm window onto the world of a young man of Turkish descent raised in Germany. İbo being both a kung fu movie… Read more →

• The Butterfly's Dream (Kelebeğin Rüyası)

  The film is set against a mining town just beginning to modernise during the Second World War. The story of two young poets working as… Read more →

• Kuzey Güney

  The real strength of Kuzey Güney is how it ties the clash between two brothers to the question of class. As the sons of an Istanbul baker… Read more →

• Where's Firuze? (Neredesin Firuze)

  Neredesin Firuze takes on Unkapanı, the hub of the cassette and CD trade, at the moment the industry's golden age was ending. In that sense… Read more →

• Rise of Empires: Ottoman

  Rise of Empires: Ottoman chooses the docudrama form to introduce Mehmed the Conqueror to a world audience, cutting expert commentary into… Read more →

• Tell Me About the Black Sea (Sen Anlat Karadeniz)

  Sen Anlat Karadeniz places a heavy social issue inside a popular love story: a woman forced into marriage at sixteen and kept under… Read more →

• The Silent Ones (Suskunlar)

  Suskunlar grows out of the real case of children in Gaziantep who, in 1997, were accused of stealing a baklava cart and sentenced in… Read more →

• A Long Story (Uzun Hikaye)

  The story runs from the 1940s to the late 1970s and opens with an orphaned boy from Bulgaria trying to put down roots in Eyüp, Istanbul.… Read more →

• Forbidden Apple (Yasak Elma)

  Yasak Elma depicts the allure of luxury in the shadow of the business world and puts the desire to climb the social ladder at the centre of… Read more →

• The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups)

  We see early-1950s Paris not through tourist postcards but from a home without warmth and a harsh classroom. The film calmly lays out a… Read more →

• I Named Her Feriha (Adını Feriha Koydum)

  At the core of Adını Feriha Koydum sits a plain question of class: the daughter of a building caretaker wins a scholarship to an elite… Read more →

• Alparslan: Great Seljuk (Alparslan: Büyük Selçuklu)

  The series tells the politics and wars of the Great Seljuk state through the reign of Sultan Alp Arslan, and bringing to the screen a… Read more →

• Asi

  Asi takes its story to the Antakya countryside and puts at its centre how land, ownership and family continuity shape lives. The farm the… Read more →

• Love Likes Coincidences (Aşk Tesadüfleri Sever)

  The film's most interesting side is that it spreads one couple's story across nearly four decades of Turkey. In flashbacks moving from the… Read more →

• Wren (Çalıkuşu)

  Published in 1922, Çalıkuşu is a novel that, through a young woman who becomes a teacher in Anatolia, touches an important question of its… Read more →

• Head-On (Gegen die Wand)

  Stretching from Hamburg to Istanbul, this story is one of the key films to look at the lives of Turks in Germany. Sibel clinging to a… Read more →

• Gümüş

  What makes Gümüş interesting is less the story on screen than the journey the series took. This romantic drama, which pairs the son of the… Read more →

• Lady's Farm (Hanımın Çiftliği)

  Hanımın Çiftliği brings Orhan Kemal's gaze on Çukurova to television. The struggle over land and influence on Adana's fertile soil makes… Read more →

• Revenge (İntikam)

  At the heart of the series lies a question of class: the bank's owner commits fraud and the manager who works there pays the price. An… Read more →

• Kayıp Şehir

  Kayıp Şehir chooses to tell Istanbul through its back streets rather than its postcard views. The Toptaş family, who migrate from the Black… Read more →

• Cranberry Sherbet (Kızılcık Şerbeti)

  Kızılcık Şerbeti uses Doğa and Fatih's sudden marriage to seat a conservative milieu and a more secular one at the same table. Clashing… Read more →

• Little Secrets (Küçük Sırlar)

  In moving Gossip Girl to Etiler, Küçük Sırlar also offers a slice of early-2010s Istanbul's class map. Adding Demir and his sister Meriç… Read more →

• Miracle Doctor (Mucize Doktor)

  Mucize Doktor may be adapted from the South Korean Good Doctor, but once it settles into a private hospital in Istanbul it asks a question… Read more →

• Do Not Forget Me Istanbul (Unutma beni İstanbul)

  The film's most meaningful claim is its reminder that Istanbul's past does not belong only to the peoples of present-day Turkey. Bosnian… Read more →

• Awakening: The Great Seljuk Empire (Uyanış: Büyük Selçuklu)

  Awakening: Great Seljuk tells of the 11th-century Great Seljuk Empire, its state structure, internal rebellions and struggle against… Read more →

• Farewell (Veda)

  Veda builds Atatürk's life not through an official historical narrative but through the memoirs of his close friend Salih Bozok, which… Read more →

• Foreign Groom (Yabancı Damat)

  The show's starting point is to approach the Greek-Turkish rivalry through humour, a bold choice for its time. Pitting a family from… Read more →

• Yahşi Charm (Yahşi Cazibe)

  Behind the comedy sits a serious subject: paper marriages made to stay in Türkiye and gain citizenship. Azerbaijani-born Cazibe's struggle… Read more →

• Love is in the Air (Yer Gök Aşk)

  Yer Gök Aşk's most interesting feature is its setting: Ürgüp, the historic town in Cappadocia. The story begins when a woman who has lost… Read more →

• Hammer and Rose: A Behzat Ç. Story (Çekiç ve Gül: Bir Behzat Ç. Hikayesi)

  Hammer and Rose ties its murder investigation to the texture of Ankara and the city's changing face. A story that leads to a family running… Read more →

• Hold On, My Heart (Dayan Yüreğim)

  Dayan Yüreğim centres on an encounter Turkish television returns to often: a family getting by in a working neighbourhood and one of the… Read more →

• If a Man Loves (Erkek Severse)

  Erkek Severse puts a notable figure at its centre: a separated mother raising her twins on her own. Zeynep's story invites reflection on… Read more →

• Dream (Rüya)

  In moving Cinderella to present-day Turkey, Rüya leans on the fairy tale's oldest theme: class. The distance between Elif, who works in a… Read more →

• The Big Brass Ring

  The film asks an old question of American politics through a Missouri governor's race: how much can a candidate's past bear the image he… Read more →

• Giuseppe Verdi

  The film portrays Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), one of the towering figures of 19th-century Italian culture, through his adult years. The… Read more →

• Mothers and Mommies (Analar ve Anneler)

  Analar ve Anneler reads early-1970s Turkey through the distance between village and big city. Kader, living in a small Anatolian village… Read more →

• My Father and My Son (Babam ve Oğlum)

  The film tells a family story set in the shadow of the 12 September 1980 coup and shows how politics can split a family in two. Sadık, who… Read more →

• The White Angel (Beyaz Melek)

  What stands out in Beyaz Melek is how it brings together a family travelling from the East to Istanbul for treatment and the world of a… Read more →

• If I Were a Cloud (Bir Bulut Olsam)

  Bir Bulut Olsam builds its love story on a real wound of the border villages near Mardin, on the Syrian frontier: landmines drifting into… Read more →

• I Loved a Child (Bir Çocuk Sevdim)

  Bir Çocuk Sevdim (I Loved a Child) asks one of the oldest questions in Turkish storytelling: can class keep two young people apart? The vow… Read more →

• Cars of the Revolution (Devrim Arabaları)

  Cars of the Revolution centres on an ambition announced after the military takeover of 27 May 1960: a fully domestic car. The film reads… Read more →

• The House You Were Born In Is Your Destiny (Doğduğun Ev Kaderindir)

  The title reads like a thesis: the house you are born in decides even whom you love. Adapted from Gülseren Budayıcıoğlu's book Camdaki Kız… Read more →

• Fazilet Hanım and Her Daughters (Fazilet Hanım ve Kızları)

  Fazilet Hanım ve Kızları tells the rich-versus-poor contrast so common in Turkish series through a mother's ambition this time. Raising her… Read more →

• The Ferhunde Ladies (Ferhunde Hanımlar)

  Ferhunde Hanımlar is a milestone in Turkish television history: as the first daily serial, it changed the relationship viewers had with TV… Read more →

• I Saw the Sun (Güneşi Gördüm)

  I Saw the Sun looks at a painful side of recent history through a large Kurdish family forced from its village in southeastern Turkey by… Read more →

• Daughters of the Sun (Güneşin Kızları)

  The series centres on a 35-year-old literature teacher in a small town who, left by her husband for no reason, raises three daughters… Read more →

• Pains of Autumn (Güz Sancısı)

  Güz Sancısı approaches the 6-7 September 1955 events, a real rupture that targeted Istanbul's non-Muslim residents, through a love story… Read more →

• Under the Linden Trees (Ihlamurlar Altında)

  Ihlamurlar Altında tells the distance between the neighbourhood and the holding company through a love story. What separates Yılmaz and… Read more →

• Business and Affairs (İşler Güçler)

  While it makes you laugh, the series also looks at a side of acting that rarely gets discussed: three actors dream of a film of their own… Read more →

• Woman (Kadın)

  Woman is an adaptation of the Japanese series of the same name, yet it grounds its story close to the local reality of a mother raising… Read more →

• Dark Angel (Kara Melek)

  Kara Melek portrays a late-1990s Turkish world where wealth, politics and business intertwine, through the eyes of a woman determined to… Read more →

• Red Room (Kırmızı Oda)

  The social significance of Kırmızı Oda lies in bringing the psychiatric clinic and the therapy room into mainstream Turkish television.… Read more →

• Salvation Last Stop (Kurtuluş Son Durak)

  Kurtuluş Son Durak turns an apartment block in Istanbul's Kurtuluş district into a small model of society. Vartanuş's life devoted to her… Read more →

• The Conqueror (Mehmed: Bir Cihan Fatihi)

  The Conqueror tells the road to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 through the young sultan's struggle not only with Byzantium but also… Read more →

• Menekşe and Halil (Menekşe ile Halil)

  The most interesting thing about Menekşe ile Halil is that it starts inside a Turkish family living in Germany. Twenty-year-old Menekşe's… Read more →

• Seddulbahir 32 Hours (Seddülbahir 32 Saat)

  Seddülbahir 32 Saat focuses on the Seddülbahir front of the Gallipoli campaign and fits a major historical event into a four-episode… Read more →

• Sparrow Palace (Serçe Sarayı)

  Serçe Sarayı looks at a striking social position by centring a young widow in Istanbul who holds up her two sons and her sister on her own.… Read more →

• The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite)

  The Edge of Heaven looks at the ties between Germany and Turkey through the eyes of two generations. Ali, a retired widower; his son Nejat… Read more →

• 300 Words of German (300 Worte Deutsch)

  Films about Turks in Germany are often stuck between heavy drama and crude comedy. 300 Worte Deutsch uses brides brought from Turkey for… Read more →

• Forbidden Love (Aşk-ı Memnu)

  What makes Aşk-ı Memnu interesting is how it moves a late-nineteenth-century novel's questions of class and marriage into the world of a… Read more →

• I Will Never Give Up (Asla Vazgeçmem)

  The starting point of Asla Vazgeçmem is a familiar Turkish story: a young woman who comes to Istanbul from Adana hoping for a better job… Read more →

• My Father and His Family (Babam ve Ailesi)

  Babam ve Ailesi puts at its centre the hypocrisy behind the flawless family image of Kemal, a respected figure in Istanbul business… Read more →

• Love in Another Language (Başka Dilde Aşk)

  At first glance this is a love story, but its real strength lies in two kinds of invisibility. On one side is a deaf young man who has… Read more →

• Behzat Ç.: Seni Kalbime Gömdüm

  With pits dug in various corners of the city, Ankara appears with the darkness behind its official face. The idea that the victims had past… Read more →

• The International (Beynelmilel)

  The International stands apart by telling the story of the martial law that followed the 12 September 1980 coup not through big cities or… Read more →

• Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da)

  Once Upon a Time in Anatolia works like a one-night portrait of the state in the provinces. A commissioner, a prosecutor and a doctor, that… Read more →

• My Grandfather's People (Dedemin İnsanları)

  Dedemin İnsanları approaches the population exchange through one family's daily life rather than grand historical narrative. Its most… Read more →

• After the Revolution (Devrimden Sonra)

  Devrimden Sonra invites viewers to imagine, at the scale of daily life, a hypothetical Turkey where a socialist revolution has taken place.… Read more →

• Heartbreaker (Gönülçelen)

  Gönülçelen brings the class question at the core of Shaw's Pygmalion to Istanbul: the gap between Murat, from a wealthy family, and Hasret… Read more →

• İffet

  What stands out most in İffet is how it puts class right at the centre. A young woman living with her father and sister in a modest… Read more →

• Istanbul Beneath My Wings (İstanbul Kanatlarımın Altında)

  The film reads the Istanbul of Murad IV through the tension between science and dogma: curious minds dreaming of flight on one side, the… Read more →

• Evidence (Kanıt)

  What is most interesting about Kanıt is its aim of introducing forensic science to a broad television audience. With its stories credited… Read more →

• Mommy, I'm Scared (Korkuyorum Anne)

  What makes Mommy, I'm Scared interesting is the way it turns one man's accident into a mirror for a whole community. When Ali loses his… Read more →

• The Headmen of the Neighborhood (Mahallenin Muhtarları)

  The real protagonist of Mahallenin Muhtarları is the neighbourhood itself. Built around the muhtar, the elected neighbourhood head, along… Read more →

• Remake

  Remake tells of two generations tested by two different wars in the same city: the father's youth falls in World War II, the son's in the… Read more →

• Farewell (Veda)

  Adapted from a work by Ayşe Kulin, Veda brings occupied Istanbul after the First World War to the screen, a period of many layers. Finance… Read more →

• Vizontele

  Vizontele can be read as more than a comedy: it is the story of a remote mid-1970s settlement, barely linked to the outside world, meeting… Read more →

• Wolffs Revier

  What makes Wolffs Revier interesting for a Turkish viewer is that its cast list includes Turkish-German actors such as Jale Arıkan, Tim… Read more →

• 7 Numara (Yedi Numara)

  The world the show builds is like a small summary of early-2000s Istanbul. Four young women who came from other cities to study and… Read more →

• Zenne

  Zenne Dancer is inspired by the real story of Ahmet Yıldız, shot dead in 2008 because of his sexual identity, so it can't be watched as… Read more →

• The Yard (Avlu)

  Although Avlu adapts the Australian series Wentworth, it tells the story of the women in Karakuyu through troubles that feel familiar in… Read more →

• I Still Have Hope (Benim Hala Umudum Var)

  The most interesting thing about the series is Umut's place in her own home. A young woman living in a modest Istanbul neighbourhood with… Read more →

• Drawers (Çekmeceler)

  Inspired by a true story, Çekmeceler (Drawers) examines the sexuality of a woman who carries the marks of childhood trauma through… Read more →

• Waiting for Heaven (Cenneti Beklerken)

  The film sets an argument about art in the middle of the seventeenth-century Ottoman world: the palace wants a rebellious prince painted in… Read more →

• Wild Heart (Deli Yürek)

  Deli Yürek draws Yusuf Miroğlu in the mould of a classic folk hero and drops him into the corrupt order of modern Türkiye. That means… Read more →

• Fatih Harbiye

  Fatih Harbiye sets two faces of Istanbul against each other: modest, conservative Fatih and wealthy, Western-minded Harbiye. That the… Read more →

• Gulbeyaz

  Centred on the feuding Dursunoğlu and Demiroğlu families of the Black Sea region, Gülbeyaz explores how family ties and long-running… Read more →

• Killing the Shadows (Hacivat Karagöz Neden Öldürüldü?)

  The film paints fourteenth-century Bursa as a city where people worn down by Mongol raids flock for refuge; migration and the search for… Read more →

• Hicran Street (Hicran Sokağı)

  Hicran Sokağı builds a Bosphorus neighbourhood as a place where class differences meet. On one side is Arif, raised in an orphanage and… Read more →

• Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul

  The film reads Istanbul as a city where genres and musical cultures touch. Its range, from classical Turkish music to indie rock and rap… Read more →

• The Day My Destiny Was Written (Kaderimin Yazıldığı Gün)

  In moving an Argentine telenovela to the Turkish countryside, the series puts the class gap between a landowning family and a young village… Read more →

• Red Buds (Kızıl Goncalar)

  Kızıl Goncalar touches one of the most sensitive fault lines in Turkish society: the deep split between strictly devout and liberal… Read more →

• Koroglu

  In telling how a groom's son rises against a powerful bey, Köroğlu puts the gulf between authority and ordinary people at its centre. The… Read more →

• The Club (Kulüp)

  Kulüp tells 1950s cosmopolitan Beyoğlu through a Sephardic Jewish mother and her daughter, and in doing so does something rarely seen on… Read more →

• Labyrinth (Labirent)

  Labirent is built on a story that shows terrorism as not only a loss of life but an international crisis: an attack that kills 95 people… Read more →

• Mehmed: Sultan of Conquests (Mehmed: Fetihler Sultanı)

  The series covers the years from the young Mehmed II's accession to the conquest of Constantinople, and it openly presents itself as… Read more →

• Bliss (Mutluluk)

  Mutluluk makes a death sentence handed down in the name of custom the first step of its story, and tells this heavy subject as a road… Read more →

• Neuilly sa mère!

  Neuilly sa mère! turns social inequality in France into comic material. The struggle of a North African teenager forced to move from the… Read more →

• Five Minarets in New York

  New York'ta Beş Minare sets out to question the paranoia towards Islam that grew after 9/11, through a story that moves between Istanbul… Read more →

• The Ottoman Republic (Osmanlı Cumhuriyeti)

  Osmanlı Cumhuriyeti places the question "What if Atatürk had never existed?" inside a comedy, using the absence of the War of Independence… Read more →

• Mercy Hill (Şefkat Tepe)

  The series follows military teams serving against the threat of terrorism from 1997 onwards, touching directly on a sensitive stretch of… Read more →

• Sila

  Sıla's real conflict is less a love story than the distance between two worlds: a woman raised by a wealthy Istanbul couple returns to the… Read more →

• Clair Obscur (Tereddüt)

  Through an Istanbul psychiatrist sent to a provincial town on compulsory service, the film makes the distance between city and province… Read more →

• Bitter Life (Acı Hayat)

  The blood feud at the heart of Acı Hayat points to a social wound that cinema of the period returned to often and that never quite dates… Read more →

• Arabesque (Arabesk)

  Arabesk is a satire aimed at the arabesque craze that dominated the cinema of its day and at Yeşilçam's pseudo-intellectuals. A village… Read more →

• Soul Kitchen

  The film sketches a city made by people of many backgrounds: a Turkish-German director, a Greek-German lead actor and a Hamburg restaurant… Read more →

• Times and Winds (Beş Vakit)

  Times and Winds is set in a mountain village where time is measured by the call to prayer rather than the clock, and people live off their… Read more →

• Let This Be the Last Time (Bu Son Olsun)

  Bu Son Olsun chooses to tell the story of the 12 September 1980 coup through the eyes of five street dwellers on the very margins of… Read more →

• Grain (Buğday)

  While depicting the near future, Grain is really talking about today's anxieties: drought, hunger, displaced refugees and the question of… Read more →

• From Lips to Heart (Dudaktan Kalbe)

  Güntekin's novel dealt with the conflict between ethics, loyalty, love and ambition; by moving it to present-day Turkey, the series puts… Read more →

• Wedding Feast (Düğün Dernek)

  Beneath the laughs of Düğün Dernek lies a social layer that is easy to miss. A son who must marry a woman he met while working in Latvia… Read more →

• Topsy-Turvy World (Düttürü Dünya)

  The film follows people clinging on at the edge of the city in one of Ankara's poor shantytown districts. Mehmet's life gets much harder… Read more →

• Missing (Eksik)

  Eksik looks at the wounds the 1980 coup opened not only in politics but inside families: a mother and two sons forced to grow up apart come… Read more →

• To Better Days (Güzel Günler Göreceğiz)

  Güzel Günler Göreceğiz invites us to think of Istanbul as a city where strangers live side by side. Cumali, Ali, Figen, İzzet and Anna… Read more →

• Life (Hayat)

  Hayat returns to an old but unfinished question in Turkish society: who decides a woman's life. Hicran's flight from an engagement forced… Read more →

• This Is My Style (İşte Benim Stilim)

  İşte Benim Stilim is an interesting case for understanding how fiercely competitive television contests had become by the mid-2010s. The… Read more →

• Paper (Kağıt)

  Kağıt takes aim at the censorship board and bureaucracy through a young director trying to make his first film in 1977. The clash between… Read more →

• My Brothers (Kardeşlerim)

  Class sits at the core of Kardeşlerim: four poor siblings enter a college owned by Akif Atakul, the man behind their misfortunes, and rich… Read more →

• The Crossroads (Kavşak)

  Kavşak portrays Istanbul not through grand vistas but through the crossing paths of people living unaware of one another. A modest chief… Read more →

• Husband Factor (Kocan Kadar Konuş)

  The premise of Kocan Kadar Konuş is socially interesting: it uses comedy to question the idea that women are steered towards a husband from… Read more →

• Saladin, the Conqueror of Jerusalem (Kudüs Fatihi Selahaddin Eyyubi)

  Kudüs Fatihi Selahaddin Eyyubi centres on one of the best-known figures of the Crusades era: Saladin, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty. What… Read more →

• The Blue-Eyed Giant (Mavi Gözlü Dev)

  By telling of the years Nâzım Hikmet spent in Bursa Prison after 1941, The Blue-Eyed Giant touches one of the most discussed stories about… Read more →

• Melikshah

  A Turkish-Iranian co-production, Melikşah keeps the sultan it is named after in the background and tells its main story through the eyes of… Read more →

• Breath (Nefes: Vatan Sağolsun)

  Decided on after the 2007 Dağlıca attack, Nefes: Vatan Sağolsun is directly bound up with the public mood of its time. Soldiers queuing for… Read more →

• Omer

  As the Turkish adaptation of the Israeli series Shtisel, Ömer becomes an interesting case of cultural translation: the tension between… Read more →

• The Ambassador's Daughter (Sefirin Kızı)

  Sefirin Kızı rests its love story on one of the sturdiest veins of Turkish television: class difference. The gap between Nare, an… Read more →

• The Bride (La novia)

  By retelling a 1933 tragedy more than eighty years later, The Bride raises an interesting question: do the expectations woven around… Read more →

• Vizontele Tuuba

  The film chooses to tell the story of the 1980 coup not from the big cities but from a small eastern Anatolian town, far from politics and… Read more →

• Kingfisher (Yalı Çapkını)

  At the core of Yalı Çapkını lies a practice still debated today: a forced marriage arranged by the head of the family. The bond formed… Read more →

• Bitter Life (Acı Hayat)

  Acı Hayat uses Mehmet, a welder at a shipyard on Istanbul's poor outskirts, and Nermin, a manicurist, to tell of young working people's… Read more →

• My Name Is Farah (Adım Farah)

  What sets Adım Farah apart from a routine crime show is the woman at its centre: a migrant forced to flee her country, getting by outside… Read more →

• Barbarossa

  Barbaros tells the rise of Ottoman seapower in the 16th-century Mediterranean through the brothers Oruç Reis and Hızır Reis, the man later… Read more →

• My Sweet Lie (Benim Tatlı Yalanım)

  The series' starting point flips roles we are used to seeing on screen: the one abandoned by a spouse and trying to raise a child alone is… Read more →

• Clash of Civilization Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio)

  In the film, Piazza Vittorio in central Rome is drawn as a small world where locals live side by side with immigrants and refugees. A… Read more →

• Eyyvah Eyvah 2 (Eyvah Eyvah 2)

  The film's comic knot is tied to a tradition that is still very much alive, the formal visit to ask for a bride's hand: that tense evening… Read more →

• Second Spring (İkinci Bahar)

  İkinci Bahar belongs to the late-1990s evenings when the whole family gathered in front of one screen. At its core is an unusual pairing: a… Read more →

• Blood Money (Kanlı Para)

  Kanlı Para shows two habits of early-seventies Turkish cinema at once: adapting a foreign story, here Once a Thief, to a local world, and… Read more →

• Kara Murat vs. Sheikh Gaffar (Kara Murat Şeyh Gaffar'a Karşı)

  The film uses as its backdrop the era of the young Mehmed II, who kept expanding his borders after taking Istanbul, but the storytelling… Read more →

• The Cut

  The Cut tells of the 1915 Armenian genocide, during the First World War, and its aftermath through the story of a blacksmith from Mardin.… Read more →

• Valley of the Wolves: Iraq (Kurtlar Vadisi Irak)

  The film takes as its starting point the real incident of 4 July 2003, when eleven Turkish soldiers were detained in northern Iraq with… Read more →

• The Founding: Orhan (Kuruluş: Orhan)

  The series takes as its subject a critical period, the reign of Orhan, when the Ottomans grew from a small beylik into an expanding state.… Read more →

• Le Beau Serge

  The French provinces of the late fifties appear here not as a postcard but as a closed community that watches itself and resists change.… Read more →

• Innocence (Masumiyet)

  On the surface Masumiyet looks like a thriller, but it invites reflection on authority within the family and the generation gap. That Ela's… Read more →

• Memoirs of a French Whore (La Dérobade)

  Because it is adapted from Jeanne Cordelier's autobiographical novel, La Dérobade reads less as a fictional exercise than as lived… Read more →

• Romantic Comedy 2: Farewell to Bachelorhood (Romantik Komedi 2: Bekarlığa Veda)

  The film's starting point is a very familiar social pressure: the panic of being the only unmarried woman in a circle of friends. Didem's… Read more →

• Romantic Comedy (Romantik Komedi)

  The film centres on three women in the big city who shape their careers and relationships through their own decisions. Esra quitting the… Read more →

• Mrs. Salkım's Diamonds (Salkım Hanımın Taneleri)

  Adapted from Yılmaz Karakoyunlu's novel, the film is a significant work that brought to mainstream cinema the Capital Tax, which imposed a… Read more →

• Singing Women (Şarkı Söyleyen Kadınlar)

  The starting point of Şarkı Söyleyen Kadınlar rests on an anxiety all too familiar to Istanbulites: the expected earthquake. Erdem makes… Read more →

• Signora Enrica (Sinyora Enrica ile İtalyan Olmak)

  The film looks at the first steps of finding your feet abroad through the eyes of a Turkish student who goes to Italy for a language… Read more →

• Black and White (Siyah Beyaz)

  Siyah Beyaz takes its name from a bar and gallery regarded for more than twenty years as a symbol of Ankara's art and intellectual life, so… Read more →

• Milk (Süt)

  As part of the Yusuf trilogy, which deals with the loss of tradition and its effect on people, Süt paints a portrait of youth stuck in the… Read more →

• In July (Im Juli)

  In July reverses the direction in a cinema used to telling the road between the two countries mostly from Turkey to Germany: a young German… Read more →

• The Water Diviner

  The film looks at 1919, just after the First World War, from a place that tries to hold both sides of the war in view. An Australian father… Read more →

• Sons of Soil (Toprağın Çocukları)

  The Village Institutes were one of the most distinctive experiments in Turkish education, and a film presented as the first to tackle the… Read more →

• Betrayal (Aldatmak)

  Aldatmak builds an interesting reversal by putting a family court judge at its centre: a career devoted to protecting other people's… Read more →

• Berdel

  Berdel takes its name from the exchange marriage in which two households give each other a daughter, and uses the custom to show how it… Read more →

• Ethos (Bir Başkadır)

  Bir Başkadır uses Istanbul as a stage where people from different social and cultural backgrounds brush against one another. The series… Read more →

• The Ignorant Fairies (Le fate ignoranti)

  An Italian-French co-production, The Ignorant Fairies pushed the ideas of marriage, fidelity and family beyond their usual borders in 2001.… Read more →

• Elkızı

  Through a young woman raised in a loveless home and her struggle to build a family of her own, Elkızı asks how violence and humiliation… Read more →

• On Board (Gemide)

  Gemide is less about telling a crime story than about holding a critical mirror to a warped social structure. The all-male world of the… Read more →

• Toll Booth (Gişe Memuru)

  Toll Booth was shot just before the manual booths on the Bosphorus Bridge switched to an automated system, a detail that gives the film the… Read more →

• Going: My Marlon and Brando (Gitmek: My Marlon And Brando)

  Gitmek: My Marlon and Brando places a love story right in the middle of borders and war. The route from Istanbul to Van and on to Urmia… Read more →

• Mive-ye gonah (Hak Yolu)

  As a Turkish-Iranian co-production counted among Iran's popular Filmfarsi tradition, Hak Yolu is an interesting cultural bridge. Opening in… Read more →

• Law Enforcement (Kanun Gücü)

  Released in 1979, Kanun Gücü puts heroin, drugs and the police fight against them at its centre, bringing a contemporary anxiety about… Read more →

• The Pomegranate (Nar)

  What stands out most in Nar is the way it gathers four people of different faiths under one roof and tests trust and the sense of justice… Read more →

• And the Rest Will Follow (O da Bir Şey mi)

  The film brings two separate worlds together in one hotel: a well-known director who lives in Istanbul, and a young woman born and raised… Read more →

• Propaganda

  Starting from a real event in 1948, Propaganda shows that a border is more than a line on a map. A sleepy village in the southeast is cut… Read more →

• Ratings Hamdi (Reyting Hamdi)

  Reyting Hamdi is an interesting window onto the screen culture of private television from the nineties to the early two-thousands. It began… Read more →

• Memories of the Wind (Rüzgarın Hatıraları)

  Rüzgarın Hatıraları looks at a painful chapter of Turkish history, the era of the Wealth Tax, through a story that begins in Istanbul… Read more →

• Foster Siblings (Süt Kardeşler)

  Set in a mansion in Ottoman times, Süt Kardeşler rests on a form of kinship rarely talked about today: milk kinship. In traditional society… Read more →

• Takva: A Man's Fear of God

  Takva stands out for portraying a way of life rarely addressed in Turkish cinema, the inner world of a devout man, without sliding into… Read more →

• Three Sisters (Üç Kız Kardeş)

  By choosing a coastal town like Ayvalık over a big city, Üç Kız Kardeş puts the dreams of girls growing up in the provinces at its centre.… Read more →

• Yozgat Blues

  Through two musicians who settle in the provinces, Yozgat Blues takes up questions of taste and belonging. Yavuz and Neşe move to Yozgat… Read more →

• Egg (Yumurta)

  Egg is really about Yusuf, who left his small hometown for Istanbul fifteen years ago, hanging between two worlds. A poet in an identity… Read more →

• The Broken Landlord (Züğürt Ağa)

  Züğürt Ağa is regarded as one of Yeşilçam's most successful films about the shift from feudalism to capitalism, and it deserves that… Read more →

• Ten to Eleven (11e 10 Kala)

  11'e 10 Kala manages to tell the story of Istanbul's transformation through a single apartment block. An old building the residents want… Read more →

• Firebirds (Ateş Kuşları)

  Street children are rarely the main characters on Turkish television, and Ateş Kuşları stands out for putting this invisible group at the… Read more →

• Offside (Dar Alanda Kısa Paslaşmalar)

  Offside treats football less as a game on the grass than as part of neighbourhood life. Esnafspor, founded by the residents of a historic… Read more →

• Epic (Destan)

  Destan is best watched not as a history series but as fiction drawing on ancient Turkish epics, above all the legend of Akkız; its plot… Read more →

• Yes Sir (Emret Komutanım)

  Compulsory military service is an experience shared by almost every family in Turkey, and Emret Komutanım captures that collective memory… Read more →

• Everything About Marriage (Evlilik Hakkında Her Şey)

  By blending divorce law with family stories, the series holds up an interesting mirror to the changing meaning of marriage in Turkey.… Read more →

• Oh Dear, Oh Dear! (Eyyvah Eyvah)

  Beneath the comedy of Eyyvah Eyvah lies an interesting question of identity. Hüseyin, a young man of Yörük stock who lives with his… Read more →

• For a Moment Freedom (Pour un instant, la liberté)

  We usually meet migration through headlines; Arash T. Riahi's film points the camera somewhere else. The wait of three separate groups who… Read more →

• Steam: The Turkish Bath (Hamam)

  Hamam reflects on the meeting of Turkey and Europe in the late nineties through a single place. Francesco, stuck in a worn-out marriage in… Read more →

• Harem Soiree (Harem Suare)

  Harem Suare chooses to tell the last days of an empire sliding into collapse in 1908 from the harem, the most closed-off space in the… Read more →

• Human Hunter (İnsan Avcısı)

  The film is an interesting document of how Turkish commercial cinema in the mid-1970s turned fears of an international conspiracy into… Read more →

• Little Bride (Küçük Gelin)

  Küçük Gelin tries to bring an issue that still persists in Turkey, child marriage, to a mass audience through a TV series.… Read more →

• L'Immortelle

  The film builds 1960s Istanbul through the eyes of a European novelist-director, and that gaze is itself a kind of document. With the leads… Read more →

• La Carapate

  The most interesting thing about La Carapate is that it sets an escape comedy in the turmoil of May 1968. A condemned convict and the… Read more →

• Intoxicated by Love

  Telling of the meeting between two great figures of the thirteenth century, Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, the film is interesting as an attempt… Read more →

• Pardon

  Pardon uses black comedy to show the helplessness of the ordinary citizen before institutions. İbrahim, who did his military service very… Read more →

• Shahmaran (Şahmaran)

  Şahmaran brings an old legend, regarded as a symbol of love and wisdom, into present-day Adana. What is most interesting about the series… Read more →

• Les Misérables

  Lelouch's most intriguing decision is to move Hugo's 19th-century misery into France during the Second World War. When an illiterate… Read more →

• The Herd (Sürü)

  Sürü is one of the rare films that shows how the move from countryside to city in 1970s Turkey lands on the shoulders of a single family.… Read more →

• Taken 2

  How a foreign blockbuster sees Istanbul is a subject in its own right. In Takip: İstanbul the city appears generously, in locations… Read more →

• Travelers of Hope (Umut Yolcuları)

  Street children being drawn into crime usually remains a side plot on television. Umut Yolcuları puts the issue at the centre and treats… Read more →

• Far (Uzak)

  Uzak puts a young man who has lost his job and come to the city from his hometown under the same roof as a settled urban photographer who… Read more →

• My Lying Love (Yalancı Yarim)

  Yalancı Yarim takes a theme mid-2000s television loved, the class divide, and handles it in the light language of romantic comedy. A family… Read more →

• Oh, Where? (Ah Nerede)

  The most interesting thing about watching Ah Nerede today is the mirror it holds, in the background, to the university youth of the 1970s… Read more →

• Love Is Red (Aşk Kırmızı)

  What makes Aşk Kırmızı interesting is that it dares to ask openly about "love between three people" in a society that treats monogamy as… Read more →

• Bahar

  The show starts from a story many women in Turkey know well: setting a career aside for the family, then realising years later how hard it… Read more →

• Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha (Barbaros Hayreddin Paşa)

  Barbaros Hayreddin Paşa takes on the victory at Preveza in 1538 and the best-known name in sixteenth-century Ottoman seafaring, Hayreddin… Read more →

• The Jackal (Çakal)

  What makes Çakal interesting is that it frames crime not as a heroic tale but as a product of poverty and desperation. Akın has worked in a… Read more →

• Market (Çarşı Pazar)

  Çarşı Pazar touches one of the most debated subjects of its time by looking at urban redevelopment through the eyes of local tradesmen. A… Read more →

• Cemo

  Cemo is set in Elazığ, in a historical provincial world that also includes an Ottoman pasha. Drawn from Kemal Bilbaşar's novel, the story… Read more →

• Brave Heart (Cesur Yürek)

  Cesur Yürek asks again a question Turkish television returns to often: is justice found in the courtroom or on the street? The romance… Read more →

• Majority (Çoğunluk)

  Majority lives up to its title: it is a portrait of an upper-middle class that is not even aware of its privilege, yet carries it on… Read more →

• Tropic (Dönence)

  Dönence's most valuable quality is that it puts the everyday reality of families living with people with special needs at the centre of the… Read more →

• Shirin va Farhad

  Shot jointly by Turkey and Iran in 1970 and prepared in both Turkish and Persian, the film is an interesting example of cooperation between… Read more →

• The Spring That Never Came (Gelmeyen Bahar)

  Gelmeyen Bahar chose to tackle the pressure of 'honour' traditions and violence against women, and even timed its release deliberately for… Read more →

• Government Woman 2 (Hükümet Kadın 2)

  The most striking thing about Hükümet Kadın 2 is that its comedy leans on a real life: Sermiyan Midyat drew the story from the life of his… Read more →

• Relationship Status: Complicated (İlişki Durumu Karışık)

  İlişki Durumu: Karışık is a neat example of an era in which series travel without borders. Full House, made in South Korea in 2004, becomes… Read more →

• Construction (İnşaat)

  The film squeezes the dead ends people run into in every corner of society onto a single building site. Two labourers with very different… Read more →

• In Pursuit of a Trace (İz Peşinde)

  İz Peşinde is a crime series that portrays early-1990s Istanbul through smuggling and the underworld. That it began on TRT 1 and carried on… Read more →

• The Crimean (Kırımlı)

  Kırımlı turns to a history too little known to wider audiences: what the Crimean Tatar Turks endured in German prisoner camps during the… Read more →

• Envy (Kıskanmak)

  The film is set in 1930s Zonguldak, in the closed social world of a provincial town during the early years of the Republic. A couple who… Read more →

• My Little Sweetheart (Küçük Sevgilim)

  Küçük Sevgilim takes Yeşilçam's favourite contrast, poverty against wealth, into the corridors of a medical school. Lale, who has no one… Read more →

• As the Crow Flies (Kuş Uçuşu)

  Kuş Uçuşu is a series for an age in which being seen has become a value, even a form of capital. The story of a young fan joining a news… Read more →

• So Be It (Öyle Olsun)

  Öyle Olsun looks like a light romantic comedy, but it opens an interesting window onto the 1970s press. A series exposing the tricks of… Read more →

• Hidden Faces (Saklı Yüzler)

  Saklı Yüzler puts honour killings squarely at its centre, turning to a social wound that has still not healed. A young woman unable to… Read more →

• Love, My Brother (Sev Kardeşim)

  Beneath the romantic surface of Sev Kardeşim lie the class lines of early-1970s Turkey. The factory girls' admiration for the owner's son… Read more →

• The Syrian Bride (La Fiancée syrienne)

  The Syrian Bride manages to fit a major political question into a single wedding day. Set in Majdal Shams, a Druze village in the occupied… Read more →

• Un témoin dans la ville

  Socially, the most interesting thing about the film is that it hands heroism not to a lone detective but to a working community. The taxi… Read more →

• Wildflower (Vahşi Çiçek)

  Vahşi Çiçek works a tension Yeşilçam returned to again and again: the distance between a man who comes from having no one and established… Read more →

• Zubuk

  Adapted from Aziz Nesin's novel, Zübük is a comedy that satirises the crooked characters of Turkish politics. İbrahim Zübükzade, who starts… Read more →

• Love, Bitter (Acı Aşk)

  With a story that stretches from a university in Eskişehir to Istanbul, Acı Aşk puts the big city's promise of a fresh start at its centre.… Read more →

• Love, Reason, Get Even (Aşk Mantık İntikam)

  The premise looks like pure rom-com, yet it carries a social question: a woman earning her living as a waitress makes a sensible marriage… Read more →

• Balalaika (Balalayka)

  Balalayka, made in 2000, gathers familiar sights of its time into a single journey: a road from Batumi to Istanbul, a brother estranged… Read more →

• Mr. E (Bay E)

  Bay E follows the nightmarish journey of a well-known media figure in years when television and media celebrities were taking up ever more… Read more →

• Nausea (Bulantı)

  Nausea can be read as a portrait of a state of mind: a self-regarding man who does 'intellectual work' and claims to live without… Read more →

• Busra

  In bringing a character born in the pages of Leman magazine to the screen, Büşra puts the contradictions of Turkish society at its centre.… Read more →

• The Mountain (Dağ)

  The most interesting thing about The Mountain lies in the gap between its two soldiers: Oğuz from Istanbul, who on principle chose regular… Read more →

• Dialogue with the Carmelites (Le Dialogue des carmélites)

  The film rests on the true story of the Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, guillotined in Paris in 1794 in the last days of the French… Read more →

• Diamonds (Diamanti)

  Diamonds is one of the rare films that puts women's work at its centre. The world of women working in a 1970s Roman fashion house, whose… Read more →

• Ruthless (Gaddar)

  What sets Gaddar apart from many crime series is that its script draws on events that really happened in Turkey: the case of a taxi driver… Read more →

• Rhino Season (Gergedan Mevsimi)

  Inspired by the Kurdish poet Sadegh Kamangar, who spent years in prison after the revolution, Rhino Season shows how political repression… Read more →

• The Heart Thief (Gönül Hırsızı)

  Gönül Hırsızı starts from the 'bachelor family' life of a divorced family's sons living under one roof with their mother, a picture rarely… Read more →

• Don't Fear Life (Hayattan Korkma)

  Hayattan Korkma looks at the world of small-town tradespeople who live on what they produce themselves: a dairyman, a chicken farmer and a… Read more →

• Two Young Girls (İki Genç Kız)

  İki Genç Kız looks at Istanbul's unseen sides through the friendship of two girls from different classes. On one side, a mother who lives… Read more →

• Valley of the Wolves: Terror (Kurtlar Vadisi Terör)

  Kurtlar Vadisi Terör is one of those productions discussed far more off screen than on it. Its attempt to tackle a painful Turkish subject… Read more →

• Malkoçoğlu Cem Sultan

  The film sets its story against the real history of Prince Cem fleeing his brother, Sultan Bayezid II, and tells the Ottoman raider… Read more →

• Meryem

  Meryem portrays an order in a small Anatolian town where a woman's fate is written by others. The girl is married off, the husband goes… Read more →

• Jolly Life (Neşeli Hayat)

  Through a man who dons a Santa Claus costume in the back streets of a Muslim country, Neşeli Hayat depicts a cultural in-between zone. In… Read more →

• The Oldest Profession (Le Plus Vieux Métier du monde)

  In tracing prostitution from prehistory to the year 2000, the film also records how 1960s Europe saw its own time and the future. As a… Read more →

• Tosun Pasha (Tosun Paşa)

  Beneath the comedy of Tosun Paşa lies a familiar social order. On Ottoman lands two powerful families compete for a fertile valley, and… Read more →

• And Then What? (Ya Sonra)

  And Then What? centres on a marriage past its seventh year and asks a very familiar question: how long can love last within the routine of… Read more →

• Man Number One Hundred (Yüz Numaralı Adam)

  Yüz Numaralı Adam offers an early look, from the late 1970s, at how advertising could turn an ordinary person into a showcase. Ayşe's plan… Read more →

• Hürmüz with Seven Husbands (7 Kocalı Hürmüz)

  Set in the Taşkasap quarter of Istanbul at the end of the 1800s, 7 Kocalı Hürmüz carries an interesting social question behind the comedy… Read more →

• Unforgiven (Affedilmeyen)

  Affedilmeyen is a clear example of the social codes of 1960s Turkish melodrama. The class gap between a rich girl and a poor musician sets… Read more →

• In Between (Arada)

  What stands out most in Arada is that it looks at 1990s Istanbul through its underground punk scene. The fact that the father Altan's music… Read more →

• The Epic of Battal Gazi (Battal Gazi Destanı)

  Battal Ghazi lives more in folk storytelling than in history books, and the film treats him that way, as an epic hero. The Malatya command… Read more →

• Everybody Go Home (Tutti a casa)

  Everybody Go Home belongs to a broad strand of Italian cinema about the chaos that followed the double occupation of September 1943; like… Read more →

• Fatma

  What makes Fatma interesting is that it puts at its centre someone usually treated as invisible: a woman who earns her living cleaning… Read more →

• The Bride (Gelin)

  Gelin, the first link in Ömer Lütfi Akad's internal-migration trilogy, tells the great transformation of early-1970s Turkey through a large… Read more →

• Kara Murat: Fatih'in Fedaisi

  Kara Murat Fatih'in Fedaisi sets a fictional hero against a real historical backdrop: the years after the fall of Constantinople, Mehmed… Read more →

• Dark Night (Karanlık Gece)

  Centring on a mountain town in Eastern Anatolia and its silence, Karanlık Gece looks at a social wound: lynching. The return of a young man… Read more →

• The Lamb

  Kuzu shows, in a poor village in eastern Anatolia, the pressure a tradition puts on a family's budget. A lamb roasted in the tandoor for a… Read more →

• Mahmut & Meryem (Mahmut ile Meryem)

  In telling of a love blocked by religious difference in the sixteenth century, Mahmut ile Meryem also opens a window onto the region's… Read more →

• The Blue Wave (Mavi Dalga)

  Following a year in the life of a girl entering her final year of high school in Balıkesir, Mavi Dalga makes visible the quiet pressure of… Read more →

• Mayrig

  Drawing on director Henri Verneuil's own childhood, Mayrig tells how a family that left Turkey after the 1915 Armenian Genocide tried to… Read more →

• Mustang

  Mustang is set on the Black Sea coast, in İnebolu, in a house where five orphaned sisters live with their grandmother and uncles. An… Read more →

• Out 1 (Out 1 : Noli me tangere)

  Out 1's most striking feature is that it draws on Balzac's La Comédie humaine. Balzac tried to paint the whole panorama of a society… Read more →

• Hi (Selam)

  Inspired by true events, Selam follows three teachers who leave their families behind for the ideal of education and head to… Read more →

• Water Also Burns (Su da Yanar)

  The film conveys the climate of pressure and fear after the September 12 coup through how hard it is for an artist to bring a name like… Read more →

• Three Thousand Years of Longing

  What makes Three Thousand Years of Longing interesting for a Turkish audience is that the story begins in Istanbul, at the Pera Palace… Read more →

• Either Independence or Death (Ya İstiklal Ya Ölüm)

  Ya İstiklal Ya Ölüm covers a short, dense stretch that opens with the occupation of Istanbul and the dissolution of the Ottoman parliament… Read more →

• The Farmhand (Yanaşma)

  Yanaşma takes its title from the young hand taken into a landlord's service at an early age, and that figure opens a good door onto the… Read more →

• Poor (Yoksul)

  Yoksul looks at the trading world of mid-1980s Turkey from inside a crowded commercial inn. Having shares, partnerships, economic crisis… Read more →

• The Road (Yol)

  Yol reads post-coup Turkey after 1980 through five prisoners' week of leave, and it states its sharpest idea early: outside the prison… Read more →

• 4 Blocks

  4 Blocks centres on a clan tied to Arab crime families in Berlin's Neukölln district and deals with loyalty, inheritance and leadership… Read more →

• Flashy Love (Afili Aşk)

  Afili Aşk starts from a woman pushed into marriage by baseless accusations spread about her. As a romantic comedy, it builds this premise… Read more →

• Davaro

  Davaro questions a two-hundred-year blood feud and the code of honour by making us laugh. Memo returning to his village with the bride… Read more →

• One Day in the Future (Gelecekten Bir Gün)

  One Day in the Future touches a familiar early-2010s anxiety through a young man who fails again and again at work and in his private life… Read more →

• The Remaining (Geriye Kalan)

  Geriye Kalan treats infidelity not as a morality tale but as an upper-middle-class marriage taking stock of itself. The contrast between… Read more →

• Qeysar

  Gheysar is built on family honour and revenge, and it is regarded as a turning point in Iranian cinema. It is credited with steering a… Read more →

• Climates (İklimler)

  Climates follows the drifting apart of İsa, an architect, and Bahar, who works in television. The film looks not at large social events but… Read more →

• Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos)

  Kısa ve Acısız tells of the friendship of three young men of Turkish, Serbian and Greek background in Hamburg's Altona district, and… Read more →

• The Cousins (Les Cousins)

  Les Cousins offers an interesting window onto generation and class in late-1950s Paris. Charles, who has come from the provinces to study… Read more →

• The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la liberté)

  The film takes its title from the opening line of the Communist Manifesto about a spectre haunting Europe, and the reference is no idle… Read more →

• Le Viager

  Le Viager starts from a distinctly French practice: buying a house in return for an annuity paid until the seller dies. The film puts the… Read more →

• The Honest Man (Namuslu)

  Namuslu is a comedy with a political edge that takes a critical look at a changing 1980s Turkey. Ali Rıza Bey's unbending honesty, in a… Read more →

• Half in Jest (Şaka ile Karışık)

  The premise of Şaka ile Karışık openly stages class difference in 1960s Istanbul: two rich families bet a million lira on whether an honest… Read more →

• Sugar Pastry (Şekerpare)

  Şekerpare is set in the Galata quarter of Ottoman-era Istanbul, yet it builds a universal satire of patronage and abuse of authority. Chief… Read more →

• You'll Love It (Seversin)

  Seversin starts from the class contrast romantic comedies love: an actor at the peak of his fame and a young woman who works behind a mall… Read more →

• The Genial Bandit (Sevimli Haydut)

  Sevimli Haydut uses the turmoil of Sultan Abdulmejid's reign as its backdrop and centres on an outlaw who stands against the bandit gangs… Read more →

• The Brain (Le Cerveau)

  The Brain is a comedy that feeds on the realities of its day. It takes the real Great Train Robbery of 1963 in England as its starting… Read more →

• Three Pennies (Üç Kuruş)

  The most striking thing about Üç Kuruş is its setting: Çıngıraklı, a Romani neighbourhood with distinctive characters and harsh rules.… Read more →

• Journey of Hope

  Umuda Yolculuk tells the human cost of illegal emigration from Turkey through the journey of an Alevi farming family from the Maraş region.… Read more →

• Vice and Virtue (Le Vice et la Vertu)

  Vice and Virtue uses occupied France as a stage on which morality is tested: in the years of war and occupation, two sisters take opposite… Read more →

• Ruby-Eyed Cat (Yakut Gözlü Kedi)

  Yakut Gözlü Kedi shows the world of a pasha's family living in a mansion in Çamlıca, framed as a crime story. The pasha, his son, his… Read more →

• Abuzer Kadayıf

  Abuzer Kadayıf sets two familiar realities of Turkey in 2000 side by side: street children's addiction and an entertainment world where… Read more →

• Somewhere in Between (Araf)

  Somewhere in Between is the story of a youth stuck in the provinces: 18-year-old Zehra, who lives with her family in her village, and… Read more →

• My Bee, My Honey, My Honeycomb (Arım, Balım, Peteğim)

  Made in 1970, the film offers telling clues about how women were seen at the time. After being abandoned, Zeynep raises her child alone… Read more →

• A Bunch Of Violets (Bir Demet Menekşe)

  The film's most interesting quality is that it builds its characters together with their class. Nesrin, a seamstress at a boutique in… Read more →

• I am Jalaliddin (Bozkır Arslanı Celaleddin)

  The series tells of the resistance of Jalal al-Din Mangburni, the last ruler of the Khwarazmian state, against the Mongol invasion, and it… Read more →

• Piano Girl (Deli Deli Olma)

  Deli Deli Olma matters because it touches a little-known chapter of history: the Molokans, whom the Tsar forcibly resettled in Eastern… Read more →

• Elena and Her Men (Elena et les Hommes)

  The film uses Paris at the start of the Belle Époque as its backdrop. Early drafts were to show General Boulanger, accused of plotting… Read more →

• Elif

  Elif carries one of the oldest themes in Turkish melodrama: a love the family would not accept, and the child who pays the price. A girl… Read more →

• Fay Grim

  What makes Fay Grim interesting for a Turkish audience is its cast. In this German-American co-production, Turkish-origin actors such as… Read more →

• Smile at Your Destiny (Gülümse Kaderine)

  The most interesting thing about the series is that it centres on the threshold where young people raised in an orphanage turn eighteen and… Read more →

• My Only Sunshine (Hayat Var)

  Hayat Var is set just beyond Istanbul's postcard face, in a wooden house beside a stream that opens into the Bosphorus, and it shows the… Read more →

• How to Keep the Red Lamp Burning (Les Bons Vivants)

  The film takes as its starting point the Marthe Richard law of 13 April 1946, which outlawed brothels in France, so a real social change… Read more →

• Fearless Coward (Korkusuz Korkak)

  The picture of extreme social decay in Korkusuz Korkak reads as satire of the skewed order of its era, and that reading still holds today.… Read more →

• La Terrazza

  La terrazza can be read as a portrait of a generation of intellectuals whose ideals have burned out. A group of friends disenchanted with… Read more →

• Les Biches

  Les Biches is regarded as the first French New Wave film to treat love between women openly, which alone makes it valuable for reading the… Read more →

• The Prisoner (Mahkûm)

  Mahkûm holds up an interesting mirror to the Turkish family of the early seventies. A cancer diagnosis, a wife sent abroad for treatment… Read more →

• The Blue Exile (Mavi Sürgün)

  The Blue Exile is about the 1925 exile of Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, the writer later known as the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, and it links… Read more →

• Where Are These Men Looking? (Nereye Bakıyor Bu Adamlar)

  Nereye Bakıyor Bu Adamlar places two big social themes of the 1970s inside a light comedy: migration from the provinces to the big city… Read more →

• Murderous City (Öldüren Şehir)

  Murderous City is a valuable document for reading 1950s Istanbul through class. A poor quarter of the Golden Horn, the nightlife of Beyoğlu… Read more →

• There (Orada)

  Through a family drawn together by a mother's death, Orada looks at the break-up of urban families. Neslihan caring for her mother for… Read more →

• King of Hearts

  Being Iran's highest-grossing film of 1968, the year 1347 in the Iranian calendar, makes Soltane Ghalbha a window onto the audience taste… Read more →

• The Lame Man (Topal)

  As the story of a humble, poor man resisting an agha's power, Topal sketches the rural power relations of its time. A world where a woman… Read more →

• Turquoise (Turquaze)

  Turquaze follows the identity crisis of three brothers of Turkish origin living in Ghent, Belgium, after their father's funeral in… Read more →

• Three Monkeys (Üç Maymun)

  Starting from a businessman preparing for an election who pays to shift the blame for a fatal accident onto a poor family, the film asks a… Read more →

• A Slightly Pregnant Man (L'Événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune)

  This 1973 film flips gender roles with the idea of a pregnant man, holding a mocking mirror up to the debates of its day. Having pregnancy… Read more →

• As Abdulhamid Falls (Abdülhamid Düşerken)

  Abdülhamid Düşerken tells of the period that began with the proclamation of the Constitution and spanned the stormy years of the Ottoman… Read more →

• The Vow (Adak)

  Adak is based on a real incident in a village in south-eastern Turkey in 1962-64, and it asks how custom and superstition can drive a… Read more →

• The Lords' Wedding Is Something Else (Başka Olur Ağaların Düğünü)

  Başka Olur Ağaların Düğünü is adapted from a work by Kemal Bilbaşar and depicts a village ruled by the agha system. Hüseyin Ağa's plan to… Read more →

• Cirkus Columbia

  Cirkus Columbia is set in Herzegovina after the break-up of Yugoslavia, right on the brink of war, and that timing casts a shadow over… Read more →

• The Mill Horse (Dolap Beygiri)

  In 1982 Atıf Yılmaz tells a story of bribery and corruption through the eyes of an honest civil servant. Ali losing his job for refusing… Read more →

• Due Date (Git Başımdan)

  Latif Selamsız's story touches a picture many Turkish viewers will recognise: a man in his late thirties who still lives with his mother… Read more →

• Beloved in the Skies (Göklerdeki Sevgili)

  Its story, which begins in the autumn of 1963, joins two threads: the class gap between an officer's family and a village craftsman's… Read more →

• The Chaos Class Is Fretting Over (Hababam Sınıfı Dokuz Doğuruyor)

  This 1978 school comedy carries clues about how its era saw identity and hierarchy. Bilo, the son of an eastern tribal chief, walking in… Read more →

• The Law of the Border (Hudutların Kanunu)

  The film treats poverty in a border village not as a backdrop but as the story itself. Barren land, smuggling, being a criminal in the… Read more →

• You Will Love People (İnsanları Seveceksin)

  Through the life of a poor porter's son in a shanty house, the film touches on the class question in late-1970s Turkey. Halil having to… Read more →

• Istanbul Nights (İstanbul Geceleri)

  Opening at Haydarpaşa station, the story drops two villagers from Kayseri straight into the big city, and the theme of the provincial… Read more →

• The Conquest of Constantinople (İstanbul'un Fethi)

  The film was made as the 500th anniversary of the conquest approached, with support from the Turkish Armed Forces and the state, which… Read more →

• Travelers of Destiny

  This 1975 Turkish-Iranian co-production, made in Persian and Turkish, is an interesting example of the two countries' film ties at the… Read more →

• Brothers (Kardeşler)

  Kardeşler examines an order in which the family comes before the individual, through a crime pinned on the younger sibling because his age… Read more →

• La Cage aux Folles

  Made in 1978, La Cage aux Folles is regarded as the first feature about the queer world to become a worldwide success, which alone makes it… Read more →

• La Reine Margot

  La Reine Margot centres on the war between Catholics and Protestants in 16th-century France and the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, a period… Read more →

• Malkoçoğlu

  Malkoçoğlu uses the era of Mehmed the Conqueror as its backdrop, but it is less a historical account than a heroic tale adapted from a… Read more →

• Mandrin, bandit gentilhomme

  Louis Mandrin was a real smuggler who defied the kingdom's tax regime under Louis XV and became a popular hero. In that sense the film… Read more →

• The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob)

  The film grew out of a wish to deliver a message of tolerance through comedy rather than sermon. A prejudiced industrialist forced to blend… Read more →

• The Fourth State (Die vierte Macht)

  The title alludes to the idea of the press as the "fourth estate", and the choice is no accident. A journalist who breaks sales records at… Read more →

• The Seventh Juror (Le Septième Juré)

  The film seems to be less about a murder than about a milieu: it is what French critics call a study of manners, looking at the world of… Read more →

• Time You Change (Zeiten ändern dich)

  A rapper bringing his own life to the screen in a film that shares its title with his ninth solo album says something in itself about… Read more →

• Paradise Now (Vaat Edilen Cennet)

  Through the story of two young men from Nablus, Paradise Now tries to understand from the inside the people behind acts that shocked the… Read more →

• Vuslat

  Vuslat's real tension comes less from the love story itself than from the gulf between two worlds. On one side is Aziz, running the holding… Read more →

• The 80th Step (80. Adım)

  80. Adım is a drama associated with themes such as prison, reckoning and the world of the police, which means it moves through the spaces… Read more →

• Bitter Life (Acı Hayat)

  Acı Hayat reads the distance between classes in the big city of the early 1960s through a love story. Mehmet, a shipyard welder, and… Read more →

• Amar en tiempos revueltos

  A soap opera set just after the Spanish Civil War and in the early years of Franco's regime looks like an odd combination at first. Yet a… Read more →

• The Horse (At)

  At does not tell migration from village to city as a romantic success story. Hüseyin mortgaging his village house so his son can go to… Read more →

• Atatürk (Atatürk 1881-1919)

  Atatürk 1881-1919 stands out for choosing to portray the founding leader through the years before the Republic, as a young man coming of… Read more →

• Lady Ayhan (Ayhan Hanım)

  Ayhan Hanım tells the story of the 12 September coup from inside a home rather than from the street. A housewife with no interest in… Read more →

• Bir Zamanlar Osmanlı: Kıyam

  The series focuses on one of the most debated periods of Ottoman history, the Tulip Era under Ahmed III. The tension between the nightly… Read more →

• Ms. Dila (Dila Hanım)

  At the heart of Dila Hanım lies the clash between custom and personal feeling. A land dispute turning into a killing shows how land and the… Read more →

• Dilber's Eight Days (Dilber'in Sekiz Günü)

  The film centres on a poor village in the east, a world where marriage looks like almost the only door open to a young woman. Dilber… Read more →

• Five Branded Women

  Five Branded Women, set in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War, takes up a particular form of wartime punishment aimed at… Read more →

• Five Years (5 Jahre Leben)

  Five Years is based on a true story, told in Murat Kurnaz's own autobiography, about the years he was held at Guantánamo without ever being… Read more →

• My Aunt Came (Halam Geldi)

  Halam Geldi takes on an urgent social problem, child brides, in Akıncılar, a border village in Cyprus where church bells answer the call to… Read more →

• The Physician (Der Medicus)

  For anyone curious about how knowledge travelled between faiths and regions in the 11th century, the film offers an engaging frame. Ibn… Read more →

• Les Uns et les Autres

  Les Uns et les Autres tries to read European history from the 1930s to the 1980s through the lives of four families from different… Read more →

• Los Serrano

  Los Serrano puts a blended family, built from children of earlier marriages, at the centre of mainstream television. Its core subject is… Read more →

• Made in Italy

  Made in Italy works like a social album of mid-1960s Italy. Its headings, customs and traditions, women, work, the citizen with the state… Read more →

• Hair (Saç)

  Hair uses Tarlabaşı not as a backdrop but as a place that shapes its character's fate. The women waiting on the sidewalk, the passing cars… Read more →

• The Voice (Ses)

  The fear in Ses springs from one of the most typical workplaces of modern city life, a bank's call centre. An employee who deals with… Read more →

• Tehran Adventure (Tahran Macerası)

  As a Turkish-Iranian co-production, Tahran Macerası is an interesting example of the regional film ties of its time. Iranian actors… Read more →

• The Stranger (Lo straniero)

  Set in colonial Algiers in 1935, the film tells the story of a man estranged from the society around him. Meursault's indifference is not… Read more →

• Body of Lies

  The film uses a spy story to examine the mistrust between Western and Arab societies. Its most interesting thread is how the CIA and… Read more →

• Yunus Emre: The Voice of Love (Yunus Emre: Aşkın Sesi)

  The film treats Yunus Emre not as the hero of a conventional biography but as a way of thinking born out of an Anatolia shaken by war and… Read more →

• Particle (Zerre)

  Zerre uses a woman trying to support her child and mother alone in the big city to show the everyday face of precarious work. Washing… Read more →

• Homeland Hotel (Anayurt Oteli)

  Anayurt Oteli is counted the first and most important example of the period after the 1980 coup, when political, socially engaged cinema… Read more →

• Austerlitz

  Austerlitz stages Napoleon less as a statesman or master strategist to be analysed than as a legendary figure, through the love affairs and… Read more →

• A Handful of Paradise

  A Handful of Paradise puts at its centre the housing problem created by internal migration, inflation and income inequality, and tells it… Read more →

• The Great Oath

  The Great Oath takes up the blood feud and the code of honour, themes Yeşilçam returned to often in the late 1960s, as a burden passed from… Read more →

• Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés)

  Stolen Kisses doesn't depict the turbulent mood of 1968 France directly, but it isn't wholly separate from it either. The locked gates of… Read more →

• Cartouche

  Cartouche takes its cue from a real highwayman, Louis Dominique Bourguignon, who lived from 1693 to 1721, but it does so loosely. A gang… Read more →

• Celal and Ceren (Celal ile Ceren)

  The most interesting thing about Celal ile Ceren is the pressure created when everyone around a couple of six years treats them as all but… Read more →

• Grbavica

  Esma's Secret shows how the systematic wartime violence against Bosnian women continued to shape everyday life long after the guns fell… Read more →

• September (Eylül)

  One of the notable things about Eylül is that, through Elena, whom Yusuf meets at the hospital, it brings an immigrant woman's loneliness… Read more →

• Big Family: Stick It (Geniş Aile Yapıştır)

  Bringing Geniş Aile to the big screen looks like part of a wider trend of popular TV comedies seeking an audience in cinemas too. The… Read more →

• Two Angry Men

  This 1976 film tries to place the social tensions of its time inside a crime story. Alongside the clash between the mob and the police, a… Read more →

• Street Vendor Girl

  Behind İşportacı Kız lies a contrast common in Turkish cinema of the time: Gül and her friends, who scrape a living as street vendors, set… Read more →

• Diploma of Craziness (Kaçıklık Diploması)

  This 1998 film treats mental health with a seriousness rarely seen in Turkish cinema. That the events feeding Nur's illness stretch from… Read more →

• The Unconquerable (Mağlup Edilemeyenler)

  Making a film in the mid-1970s with press freedom, bribery and corruption at its centre is a striking choice. Atıf Yılmaz and Erdoğan Tünaş… Read more →

• Innocence (Masumiyet)

  Masumiyet opens on the aimlessness of a man who went to prison for an honour killing, and that opening alone states the film's social… Read more →

• There Is Democracy in the Country (Memlekette Demokrasi Var)

  The 27 May coup and the days when Adnan Menderes was held on Yassıada remain an emotionally heavy period in Turkey's recent history.… Read more →

• Moscow Code: Temel (Moskova'nın Şifresi: Temel)

  Temel jokes are one of the familiar examples of how regional identity in Turkey gets stereotyped through humour, and this film takes that… Read more →

• Papy fait de la résistance

  Resistance fighters and collaborators in occupied France are among the most sensitive subjects in French memory. This film's nerve lies in… Read more →

• Shabaniye (Şabaniye)

  Şabaniye turns a heavy social problem, the blood feud, into material for comedy. A tradition that forces a family to flee its home becomes… Read more →

• Les Misérables

  Hugo's novel is a great text on poverty, justice and social stigma in Restoration France, and this series keeps that basic frame. The… Read more →

• Şefer Sözü (Şeref Sözü)

  Made at the end of the 1970s, the film portrays a world in which a poor family sees education as the way out. Rıfat putting off his own… Read more →

• Hot Skull (Sıcak Kafa)

  Hot Skull arrived in 2022, when the experience of a pandemic was still very fresh in collective memory, which gives its themes of… Read more →

• The Sultan's Secret (Sultanın Sırrı)

  The film tries to build a historical puzzle by linking a chest from the reign of Abdul Hamid II to present-day power struggles over oil.… Read more →

• Two Men in Town (Deux hommes dans la ville)

  Two Men in Town openly argues against the death penalty, harsh prison conditions and the obstacles former convicts face in returning to… Read more →

• That Night in Varennes (La Nuit de Varennes)

  June 1791 is a moment when the French Revolution has not yet fully found its direction. The film fits that uncertainty into a single coach… Read more →

• Violette Nozière

  The film is based on the true story of an eighteen-year-old girl accused of poisoning her parents in 1933 France. Chabrol is interested… Read more →

• Weekend at Dunkirk (Week-end à Zuydcoote)

  Following French soldiers waiting to be evacuated from the Dunkirk shore in June 1940, the film approaches the war not through victories at… Read more →

• Blockade (Abluka)

  Abluka tells of an Istanbul gripped by street-level political unrest from inside its shantytown districts. An ex-convict working as an… Read more →

• Her Name Is Sevgi (Adı Sevgi)

  The series centres on the tension between education, family power and the future of girls in a small town. The teacher standing by a… Read more →

• Goodbye (Allaha Ismarladık)

  In telling of occupied Istanbul and the Kuvay-ı Milliye fighters smuggling arms and ammunition to Anatolia, the film also shows how the War… Read more →

• Tears of Love (Aşkın Gözyaşları)

  The film uses the language of melodrama to show how class difference stood in the way of love at the end of the fifties. On one side is the… Read more →

• Beaumarchais (Beaumarchais, l'insolent)

  The film portrays Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799): playwright, financier and spy. Its focus on his activities during the… Read more →

• City of Women (La città delle donne)

  Made in 1980, City of Women places a large feminist gathering at the heart of its story and puts one man's view of women at the centre.… Read more →

• King of the Garbage Collectors (Çöpçüler Kralı)

  The comedy of Çöpçüler Kralı rests on the fabric of a 1970s Istanbul neighbourhood. That the hero is a street cleaner, the girl he loves a… Read more →

• Phosphorescent Cevriye (Fosforlu Cevriyem)

  Adapted from a work by Suat Derviş, the film brought a literary source to the broad Yeşilçam audience at the end of the sixties. The… Read more →

• Shadows and Faces (Gölgeler ve Suretler)

  The film tells of the days in 1963 when fighting broke out between Turkish and Greek Cypriots, inspired by real events and seen through the… Read more →

• Hostage

  Hostage starts from a real bus hijacking in Northern Greece in 1999 and refuses to treat it as just a crime story. A man of Albanian origin… Read more →

• Two-Headed Giant (İki Başlı Dev)

  The film asks a pertinent question about the family structure of 1990, when it was made: where does a father's authority end and a child's… Read more →

• Ant Trap (Karınca Kapanı)

  Karınca Kapanı places the power of big capital in Turkey, construction in particular, inside a thriller frame. A holding-company owner… Read more →

• Mold (Küf)

  Küf follows a father who has waited eighteen years for a son taken into custody and never heard from again, turning the silent wait of the… Read more →

• Lemon Tree

  In the shadow of the wall between Israel and Palestine, Lemon Tree brings a vast issue down to human scale through a single grove. When the… Read more →

• Munich

  Munich opens with the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and goes on to question the moral price of the covert revenge… Read more →

• Consent (Rıza)

  Through a man who hauls goods between Adana and Istanbul and owns nothing but his truck, Rıza looks at a fragile world of labour. A… Read more →

• Solino

  Solino covers twenty years, from 1964 to 1984, in snapshots taken a decade apart, and patiently traces what migration does to a family. The… Read more →

• Somuncu Baba: The Secret of Love (Somuncu Baba Aşkın Sırrı)

  Through the life of Sheikh Hamid-i Veli, known in Anatolia as Somuncu Baba, the film looks at the dervish lodge as a place of learning and… Read more →

• Last Raid (Son Akın)

  Son Akın summons the raiders' world on the Ottoman-Hungarian frontier through place names such as Esztergom, Kanizsa, the Kulpa and the… Read more →

• The Train

  The film reminds us that war can target not only human lives but a country's cultural memory. The attempt in August 1944 to ship paintings… Read more →

• The Shrewd Brothers (Uyanık Kardeşler)

  Beneath the comic plot of Uyanık Kardeşler lies a generational clash that was very familiar in the mid-seventies. The factory-owner father… Read more →

• Wild (Yabani)

  Yabani is a drama that turns the lost-child theme into a question of class and belonging. Ali, raised on the streets, returning as Yaman… Read more →

• The Lonely Ones' Quay (Yalnızlar Rıhtımı)

  The film looks at the night life of a quayside: a bar owner who smuggles currency, the nightclub hostess who is his kept woman, and a… Read more →

• Crab Basket (Yengeç Sepeti)

  Yengeç Sepeti takes its name from crabs in the same basket pulling each other down, and applies that image to family relationships. It is… Read more →

• Berlin in Berlin

  Berlin in Berlin looks at the marks migration leaves through a Turkish family that has lived in Germany for three generations. The fatal… Read more →

• A Sip of Love (Bir Yudum Sevgi)

  Bir Yudum Sevgi centres on a woman caught between home and factory in the Türkiye of its day. When her husband is left without work and the… Read more →

• Cliente

  Cliente portrays a world where money and feeling meet in the same relationship. A woman in her fifties who put her career first and lives… Read more →

• Female Enemy (Dişi Düşman)

  Dişi Düşman takes the day Byzantium fell in 1453 as the starting point for a treasure hunt, then moves the story to 1960s Istanbul. History… Read more →

• Woman (Hanım)

  Through a lonely woman descended from an Ottoman pasha, Hanım offers a portrait that can also be read as the solitude of a once-elite… Read more →

• Wound of Heartbreak (Hicran Yarası)

  The story of Hicran Yarası holds a familiar picture of 1959 Türkiye: a young man living in a shanty-town house with two friends and making… Read more →

• Stain (Leke)

  What makes Leke interesting is the way it sets two worlds against each other. On one side is Yasemin, whose life began in Germany, who… Read more →

• The Mine (Maden)

  Maden is one of the clearest examples of the political film wave of the 1970s. The clash between workers trying to organise in the face of… Read more →

• Medici: Masters of Florence

  Medici tells how a family who were bankers to the Pope built and defended their power in fifteenth-century Florence. Showing the… Read more →

• My Best Enemy (Mein bester Feind)

  Set in Vienna during the Second World War, the film shows how a new political order tears two boyhood friends apart: Victor, from a Jewish… Read more →

• Brother’s Keeper (Okul Tıraşı)

  Okul Tıraşı uses a remote boys' boarding school as a small-scale model of society. Under pressure and harsh discipline, children far from… Read more →

• Piano Piano Kid (Piano Piano Bacaksız)

  The film is set in Turkey in 1944, while the Second World War is under way, in a wooden mansion whose rooms are shared by different… Read more →

• Haze (Pus)

  Pus tries to portray Istanbul's poorer outskirts without prettifying them, through the daily life of a young man scraping by. Work in the… Read more →

• Stavisky

  The film centres on a real scandal that shook 1930s France. The fortune Alexandre Stavisky built on fraudulent deals worth millions says… Read more →

• Sultan

  Sultan brings the shantytown neighbourhoods growing on the edge of the big city in the late 1970s to the screen with an almost documentary… Read more →

• The Caiman (Il caimano)

  The film opened in Italy only about two weeks before the 2006 general election that Berlusconi lost; that timing alone shows how tightly… Read more →

• The Common Man (Dupont Lajoie)

  The stress on the common man in the international title suggests a film that looks for evil not in monsters but in everyday people. The… Read more →

• The Marchers (La Marche)

  The film is loosely drawn from the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, so its subject is a real social movement. Mohamed, who… Read more →

• The Source (La Source des femmes)

  The Source centres on a remote mountain village somewhere in North Africa, where fetching water from the spring at the top is left to the… Read more →

• The Under-Gifted (Les Sous-doués)

  Les Sous-doués pokes fun at exam anxiety and a diploma-obsessed view of education. In a system where the baccalauréat is treated as a… Read more →

• The Wing or the Thigh (L'Aile ou la Cuisse)

  The film satirises the rise of industrial food and the closed little world of haute cuisine. Tricatel, grown big on roadside restaurant… Read more →

• Traffic Jam (L'ingorgo)

  Made at a time when the car stood for freedom and prosperity, the film turns those same cars into cells. As hundreds of people stay stuck… Read more →

• And the Band Played On

  Drawing on Randy Shilts's non-fiction book, the film looks at how a mysterious new illness was met in early-1980s America. What makes it… Read more →

• Almanya – Welcome to Germany (Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland)

  Almanya approaches guest-worker migration through humour rather than heavy drama, and that choice opens the film wide. Through the family… Read more →

• I'm Looking for My Mother (Annemi Arıyorum)

  Released in 1959, the film puts a mother who abandons her family at its centre, a striking subject for its time. The story sets the family… Read more →

• Baarìa

  Perhaps the real protagonist of Baarìa is the town itself. Through the generations of one family living in the same place, the film traces… Read more →

• Be Sick... It's Free (Il medico della mutua)

  This 1968 satire takes aim at Italy's health insurance funds, the mutua of the title. Guido Tersilli getting rich by inflating his patient… Read more →

• The Great War (La grande guerra)

  The Great War looks at the Italian front of World War I from somewhere other than the official story of heroism. In the trenches around the… Read more →

• The Day of the Jackal (Chacal)

  The film approaches the deep rift in France after the Algerian War through the clandestine OAS's plan to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.… Read more →

• Chrysalis (Camdaki Kız)

  Camdaki Kız brings a young architect's path across that of the Koroğlu family, who run Turkey's largest hotel chain, putting class… Read more →

• Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au corps)

  That Le Diable au corps caused a scandal in 1947 says as much about the France of its day as about the film itself. Raymond Radiguet's… Read more →

• Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d'une femme de chambre)

  The film turns a sharp satirical eye on the provincial bourgeoisie of Normandy between the wars and reads the reactionary traditions of… Read more →

• The Enemy (Düşman)

  Düşman shows, in a socially realist idiom, how unemployment shakes a family step by step. İsmail, overqualified for the work on offer… Read more →

• EGO

  The show's other title, Erkeğe Güven Olmaz (Never Trust a Man), promises a debate about gender relations and trust from the start. Yet the… Read more →

• Exodus: Gods and Kings

  Exodus reinterprets a story drawn from the Book of Exodus, one that lives in the shared memory of three major religions, through the… Read more →

• September Storm (Eylül Fırtınası)

  Eylül Fırtınası tells the story of the 12 September coup not from the public squares but from the daily life of a five-year-old staying… Read more →

• Secrets from the Past (Geçmişteki Sır)

  A co-production between Turkey and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the film tries to explore the bond between the two countries through a young… Read more →

• Is Paris Burning? (Paris brûle-t-il ?)

  The film, about the liberation of Paris in August 1944, brings the Resistance, the Allies and the occupiers into a single frame.… Read more →

• Mr. Kılıç (Kılıç Bey)

  Kılıç Bey carries a theme common in the popular cinema of the seventies: the child of a family that has lost its land arriving in the big… Read more →

• Le Gang

  Le Gang makes the chaos of Paris just after the Second World War the ground for a crime story. Drawing on the real criminal Pierre Loutrel… Read more →

• Mayerling

  The Mayerling incident is a real historical tragedy, and the film reads it first and foremost as a forbidden love. Rudolf's suffocation… Read more →

• Napoleon

  Napoléon is an interesting record of how France wanted to remember its own towering figure. Telling the story through Talleyrand reminds us… Read more →

• Other Angels (Teslimiyet)

  Teslimiyet looks directly at a subject rarely seen in Turkish cinema: the lives of travesti and trans women. Set in Tarlabaşı, the story… Read more →

• Triple Cross

  Looking at wartime espionage through a real person lifts the film above an ordinary adventure. Eddie Chapman's move from safecracking to… Read more →

• Vallanzasca - Angels of Evil (Vallanzasca - Gli angeli del male)

  The film centres on Renato Vallanzasca, who made his name in 1970s Milan with audacious robberies. What is socially most interesting is how… Read more →

• Fire! (Yangın Var)

  Yangın Var connects Diyarbakır with a small town near Trabzon by way of a fire truck, and that simple idea measures the distance between… Read more →

• Oath (Yemin)

  Yemin centres on a tension Turkish television loves: the distance between tradition and big-city wealth. Reyhan, orphaned after her… Read more →

• Yusuf and Kenan (Yusuf ile Kenan)

  Yusuf ile Kenan, from the late 1970s, sets two deep social wounds side by side through the eyes of two children: the blood feud and the… Read more →

• 180°

  180° fits a society where several languages and origins live side by side into a single evening. The mere fact that German, Italian, Swiss… Read more →

• 40 Square Meters of Germany (40 qm Deutschland)

  Tevfik Başer's film portrays the era of labour migration to Germany not through factories or streets but from inside a sunless… Read more →

• Mother's Home (Ana Ocağı)

  Ana Ocağı asks a question that late-1970s cinema often returned to: why are money and power so seductive to a young man who grows up… Read more →

• The Dam (Baraj)

  Baraj sets two lives on the margins of 1970s Turkey side by side: men working on a remote dam construction site and a woman living in a… Read more →

• Debt (Borç)

  Borç asks about the economic cost of kindness through the eyes of an ordinary man who works at a small print shop in Eskişehir. Tufan's… Read more →

• Mud (Çamur)

  Çamur tries to tell the Cyprus question not in the language of news reports or history lessons but through a soldier's body. In the… Read more →

• Code Name: Tiger (Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche)

  The film is a small document of how strong the 1960s spy-film wave was. Bond's success spawned a trend in Europe known as Eurospy, and this… Read more →

• Downfall (Der Untergang)

  Downfall tells the story of Hitler's last days in April 1945, as the Battle of Berlin rages, largely shut inside the underground bunker.… Read more →

• Comedy of Power (L’Ivresse du pouvoir)

  Chabrol's film is based on the Elf Aquitaine bribery and corruption scandal that shook France in the mid-1990s. The investigating… Read more →

• Uncle (Dayı)

  Dayı puts the relationship between slum poverty and education at its centre in the mid-seventies. A professor who grew up poor himself and… Read more →

• The Problem Is with Me (Dert Bende)

  The film depicts a world Yeşilçam was very fond of in the early 1970s: the wealthy waterfront-mansion families of Istanbul. Fatma wavering… Read more →

• Wishing Stone (Dilek Taşı)

  The series stands out for putting Istanbul's shanty neighbourhoods and the precarity of the industrial worker at its centre. A factory shut… Read more →

• El Ministerio del Tiempo

  The show's most intriguing move is to frame national history as territory that must be guarded. A secret ministry tasked with stopping the… Read more →

• Belle de Jour

  Belle de Jour looks behind the closed doors of the 1960s French bourgeoisie. The inner life of Séverine, married to a wealthy, handsome… Read more →

• Hazal

  Hazal treats custom not as a backdrop but as the story itself. The daughter of a poor village family in the Mardin region loses her husband… Read more →

• Runaway (Kaçış)

  Kaçış touches on an important subject in looking at the dangers faced by journalists working in conflict zones. The story begins with… Read more →

• La Femme et le Pantin

  This 1959 film is an interesting document of how women were imagined at the time. For the wider public, Bardot was then the very embodiment… Read more →

• Les Mystères de Paris

  Adapted from the Eugène Sue novel that swept Europe in the 1840s, the film is set in Paris under King Louis-Philippe. Its most interesting… Read more →

• Malevil

  Malevil joins the nuclear anxieties of the early 1980s with the question of how society might be rebuilt after a catastrophe. The survivors… Read more →

• Meeting with Pol Pot (Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot)

  Rithy Panh looks at Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia through the way the regime wanted to present itself to the world. Three French journalists… Read more →

• Monsieur Klein

  Monsieur Klein uses a case of mistaken identity to make us think about how the persecution of Jews in occupied Paris ran through… Read more →

• Plot (L'Attentat)

  Plot draws on the disappearance of the Moroccan opposition figure Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris in 1965, and rebuilds that real affair through… Read more →

• Selahattin Eyyubi

  Set in the era of the Crusades, the film reflects an interesting cultural collaboration of its time: a Turkish-Iranian co-production made… Read more →

• Wild Blood (Sanguepazzo)

  The film draws on the real lives of Osvaldo Valenti and Luisa Ferida, two of the most popular actors of the Mussolini years, and opens with… Read more →

• Album

  Album is less about a baby than about the fear of what the neighbours will say. A history teacher and a tax-office clerk trying to keep an… Read more →

• Mother (Ana)

  Ana tells of the blood feud without romanticising it, through the devastation it leaves behind. Döndü, who shoulders the whole burden after… Read more →

• A Touch of Spice (Bir Tutam Baharat)

  A Touch of Spice tells of an Istanbul Greek family's forced migration through a kitchen and the bond between a grandfather and his… Read more →

• Gang (Çete)

  Çete builds a story reaching back to the War of Independence around an unusual heroine: a princess of the Russian court who married a… Read more →

• Desert Eagle (Çöl Kartalı)

  Çöl Kartalı is set in 1913, just after the Balkan Wars, when the Ottoman Empire was struggling with desert tribes in Yemen. Using the… Read more →

• Earthquake (Deprem)

  Deprem tells the tension between going home and looking at home through city eyes by way of a love triangle. Ahmet comes back to the… Read more →

• Fatoş's Babies (Fatoş'un Bebekleri)

  Fatoş'un Bebekleri can also be read as a small document of how marriage was imagined in the early 1960s, seen through comedy. A husband who… Read more →

• Passed by Censor (Görülmüştür)

  Through an officer who reads prison letters, Görülmüştür shows the everyday face of censorship. For Zakir, blacking out objectionable lines… Read more →

• I nuovi mostri

  I nuovi mostri is an anthology conceived as a satire of social conditions in 1970s Italy. Fourteen unconnected episodes seem to hold up a… Read more →

• İbo and Güllüşah (İbo ile Güllüşah)

  Beneath its playful surface, İbo ile Güllüşah carries telling traces of 1970s Turkey. A poor young man who cannot marry because of the… Read more →

• A Most Wanted Man

  What interests me most is that the film approaches migration and security from inside the home of a Turkish family in Hamburg's Muslim… Read more →

• İstanbul'un Kızları

  İstanbul'un Kızları looks at the distance between urban youth and the provinces in the mid-1960s through a weekend getaway. The clash… Read more →

• Boatman (Kayıkçı)

  Kayıkçı uses a love story to question the short stretch of water that divides the two shores of the Aegean. A man setting out to swim from… Read more →

• A Tale of Three Sisters (Kız Kardeşler)

  The practice of besleme at the heart of A Tale of Three Sisters recalls an old custom of sending girls to live in other families' homes… Read more →

• What Ships I Burned (Ne Gemiler Yaktım)

  The premise deserves attention: making motherhood the only thing that unites two women from different worlds puts the possibility of… Read more →

• On the Path (Na putu)

  Jasmila Žbanić looks at the everyday life of a generation in Sarajevo still marked by the war. Amar turning to a conservative religious… Read more →

• Sign of the Lion (Le Signe du Lion)

  Sign of the Lion takes a cool-headed look at the link between money and friendship. Pierre's circle stays by him as long as the inheritance… Read more →

• Excitement in the Ranks (Sıralardaki Heyecan)

  Within the mould of a seventies youth melodrama, Sıralardaki Heyecan is really a story about class. On one side are rich, spoiled teenagers… Read more →

• The Master (Usta)

  Usta treats the industrial district not as a backdrop but as a world of its own. A mechanic building an airplane in his backyard draws both… Read more →

• War Machine

  War Machine starts from journalist Michael Hastings's inside account of the war in Afghanistan and recreates General Stanley McChrystal's… Read more →

• 3 Turks and a Baby (3 Türken und ein Baby)

  Sinan Akkuş's film is a German comedy centred on three brothers named Yıldız: Celal, Sami and Mesut. That it was shot in German and is… Read more →

• Justice (Adalet)

  Made in 1978, Adalet sets the crime-thriller formula inside a political frame: two policemen try to expose the dirty dealings between a… Read more →

• And Now My Love (Toute une vie)

  Described by Lelouch as a tribute "to life, to love and to the 20th century", the film passes a love story through generations and… Read more →

• The Hunt (Av)

  Av treats the blood feud not just as a revenge story but as a burden handed down from one generation to the next. Bekir, out of prison… Read more →

• Dark Cloud (Bahtı Kara)

  Bahtı Kara treats failure less as a personal flaw than as a family matter. A father who cannot hold down a job and lost his wife years ago… Read more →

• Blueberry

  Set in the 1870s Wild West, the film pits a Civil War veteran turned marshal against greed for gold on Native American land. That frame… Read more →

• Borsalino

  Borsalino tells of two young troublemakers rising through the Marseille underworld, and it draws on the real gangsters Paul Carbone and… Read more →

• Chiko

  Chiko holds up a harsh mirror to a section of the young Turks raised in Germany. The story of two angry young men in the Hamburg suburbs… Read more →

• Coriolanus

  Moving Coriolanus to a Balkan state that evokes the Yugoslav Wars brings the play's class conflict very close to the present. An elite… Read more →

• Dissolutions (Çözülmeler)

  Çözülmeler is a serious drama that looks into the inner lives of a generation that lived through the coups of 12 March and 12 September.… Read more →

• Don't Touch the White Woman! (Touche pas à la femme blanche !)

  Ferreri sets the genocide of Native Americans beside the pushing of working-class people out of city centres, drawing a striking parallel.… Read more →

• The Sorcerer Father (Efsuncu Baba)

  Efsuncu Baba puts belief in spells, talismans and amulets at its centre and uses humour to criticise a social weakness. Ebülfazıl Enveri… Read more →

• Revenge of the Flame (İntikam Alevi)

  The film centres on the life of a working man, a truck driver, in 1950s Istanbul, which is notable in itself for the cinema of the period.… Read more →

• Joan Lui (Joan Lui - Ma un giorno nel paese arrivo io di lunedì)

  Joan Lui, from the mid-eighties, reimagines a religious figure as a contemporary singer in order to take aim at the hypocrisy of Western… Read more →

• Marie Antoinette Queen of France (Marie-Antoinette reine de France)

  Jean Delannoy's film sets Marie Antoinette's court life beneath the gathering storm of the Revolution. That is a strong frame for thinking… Read more →

• Hatred (Nefret)

  Nefret focuses on the break-up of a wealthy urban family in the mid-1980s. Hülya's anger, blaming her mother for the divorce, also exposes… Read more →

• Teacher Kemal (Öğretmen Kemal)

  The film tells the clash between enlightenment and bigotry in a village through a teacher devoted to Atatürk's principles. The drive to… Read more →

• The Black Angel (Siyah Melek)

  Siyah Melek tells the years of the War of Independence from Istanbul, through the eyes of a secret network running weapons and ammunition… Read more →

• The Last Kiss (L'ultimo bacio)

  The film portrays the growing pains of a generation that, nearing thirty, starts to doubt choices it thought were settled. Carlo's failure… Read more →

• Teheran 43

  The film starts from Operation Long Jump, Nazi Germany's alleged plan to assassinate the Allied leaders during the Tehran Conference, and… Read more →

• The Family (La famiglia)

  The Family watches twentieth-century Italy not from the great public squares but from inside a middle-class family's home. The two world… Read more →

• Don't Let Them Shoot the Kite (Uçurtmayı Vurmasınlar)

  Set in Ankara in 1984, in the aftermath of the 12 September 1980 coup, the film shows everyday life in a women's prison through the eyes of… Read more →

• A Bad Son (Un mauvais fils)

  The film handles addiction and the difficulty of returning to society after prison without embellishment. A young man sent back to France… Read more →

• Fallow Deer (Ala Geyik)

  With a story compiled from Yaşar Kemal's Anatolian legends, Ala Geyik paints an interesting picture of power in the countryside. That… Read more →

• Ankara Summer: Farewell Letter (Ankara Yazı Veda Mektubu)

  Ankara Yazı Veda Mektubu focuses on one of the darkest sides of the 12 September coup era: how detention and the courts actually worked.… Read more →

• The Gap (Ara)

  While telling of two urban middle-class couples swinging between friendship, desire and betrayal, Ara lets you feel Turkey's recent… Read more →

• Where the Fire Burns (Ateşin Düştüğü Yer)

  Ateşin Düştüğü Yer takes on honour killings, one of Turkey's most painful social wounds, drawing on a real case. Through a conservative… Read more →

• The Bathroom (Banyo)

  By turning the most private room of the home into a stage, Banyo tries to expose hidden tensions, betrayals and quietly growing selfishness… Read more →

• Lady Cazibe's Daydreams (Cazibe Hanımın Gündüz Düşleri)

  Cazibe Hanımın Gündüz Düşleri paints a portrait of a woman with no say over her own life. Cazibe, in her late thirties, has had to turn… Read more →

• Torn Apart (Daha 17)

  Daha 17 takes an experience we rarely see on screen, growing up in the foster care system, as its starting point. Aras losing his family at… Read more →

• Deux heures moins le quart avant Jésus-Christ

  Jean Yanne's film sends up Bible epics such as Ben-Hur and their grand picture of Rome. A hero who runs a garage in a colony of the Roman… Read more →

• Return (Dönüş)

  Dönüş is an important link in the chain of early-1970s films about the "Almancı", Turkish workers in Germany, and it shows that migration… Read more →

• The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (Dünyanın En Güzel Kadını)

  The film tells of a woman's struggle to make her mark on stage in the late 1960s, through a story partly set in the nightclub world. A… Read more →

• Goodnight, Ladies and Gentlemen (Signore e signori, buonanotte)

  Few films satirise the distrust of institutions in mid-1970s Italy as directly as this one. Political corruption, the army, the Catholic… Read more →

• Migrant Birds (Gurbet Kuşları)

  Gurbet Kuşları is counted among the first Turkish films about migration from the countryside to the city, and that pioneering status still… Read more →

• Kerem and Asli (Kerem İle Aslı)

  The film brings out a layer of the folk tale that often goes unnoticed: how those in power treat the people. The dervish makes the promise… Read more →

• Lines of Wellington (Linhas de Wellington)

  Mention the Napoleonic Wars and most people picture great generals and pitched battles. Lines of Wellington instead chooses to tell the… Read more →

• Luxury Life (Lüküs Hayat)

  In 1930s Turkey, in the years after the founding of the Republic, there was a marked distance between the well-off who embraced… Read more →

• Masculin Féminin

  The film observes the youth of 1960s Paris almost like a piece of fieldwork. The gap between Paul, who takes to the streets against the… Read more →

• Back to Back (Peşpeşe)

  Peşpeşe looks at the commitment problem of a young urban generation in the early 2010s. Pelin, a London-based wedding photographer who runs… Read more →

• Vagabond Lover (Serseri Aşık)

  Serseri Aşık sets two worlds of mid-1960s city life against each other: on one side a wealthy businessman determined to keep his son away… Read more →

• My Dear Son (Sevgili Oğlum)

  Sevgili Oğlum takes on a theme Turkish cinema has often returned to, migration from the countryside to the city, through a father-and-son… Read more →

• Last Meeting (Son Bulusma)

  Son Buluşma approaches the Turkish War of Independence not through textbook narrative but through the daily lives of its last living… Read more →

• The Other Side of the Water (Suyun Öte Yanı)

  Suyun Öte Yanı sets the early 1980s, when people were jailed for their political views, against the calm of Cunda Island. The film places… Read more →

• A Self Made Hero (Un héros très discret)

  What makes Un héros très discret most interesting is the question it asks about how history gets written. A life story is built both from… Read more →

• A Cursed Monarchy (Les Rois maudits)

  Adapted from Maurice Druon's novel cycle, the series covers a long stretch, from the last five Capetian kings to the first two kings of the… Read more →

• Bitter Rice (Acı Pirinç)

  The worker roles in the cast list of Acı Pirinç suggest that part of the story unfolds around working life. Ömer Ağa, played by Erol Taş… Read more →

• Ablaze (Alev Alev)

  Alev Alev shows how money, status and ambition shape love in the mid-eighties. The class gap between a yacht captain who, short of money… Read more →

• On the Fertile Lands (Bereketli Topraklar Üzerinde)

  Adapted from a story by Orhan Kemal, the film shows the merciless conditions of day-labour farm work through three friends who come from… Read more →

• A Handful of Soil (Bir Avuç Toprak)

  The film sets an Anatolian village's land order, in a period reaching back to 1948, in the background: power relations between the… Read more →

• The Trial (Dava)

  The Trial is about the individual's helplessness before a system he cannot make sense of. A bank clerk prosecuted without ever being told… Read more →

• The Innocent (Günahsızlar)

  Through the clash between a successful architect and a nightclub owner, the film sets two faces of early-1970s city life against each… Read more →

• Homoti

  Homoti brings two striking subjects into comedy for the Turkey of 1987: a press world that bends the truth for a story, and an alien who… Read more →

• Au revoir les enfants

  Inspired by the Carmelite boarding school Malle entered at twelve, the film portrays occupied France in 1944 not through battle scenes but… Read more →

• The Organizer (I compagni)

  Set in Turin at the end of the 19th century, the film follows the workers of a textile factory as they organise against long hours and… Read more →

• Il bell'Antonio

  Brancati's novel was set in the fascist years; when Pasolini and Visentini's script moves the story to the days of the shoot, an… Read more →

• Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

  Jeanne Dielman is counted among the key works of feminist cinema because it shows unseen domestic labour with unusual patience. Three days… Read more →

• If a Woman Loves (Kadın Severse)

  As the 1968 second adaptation of a novel published in 1939, Kadın Severse offers a chance to compare which values had and had not changed… Read more →

• Kung Fu on the Bosporus (Karateciler İstanbul'da)

  This 1974 Turkish-Hong Kong co-production stands for one of Yeşilçam's attempts to reach beyond its borders. The idea of the Far Eastern… Read more →

• La Masseria Delle Allodole

  The film follows what befalls an Armenian family in Anatolia in 1915, during the First World War, and is regarded as one of cinema's rare… Read more →

• Mado

  Mado looks at the underside of the ruthless seventies business world: corruption, swindles and a corrupt former official forced to sell a… Read more →

• Murat and Nazlı (Murat İle Nazlı)

  The film uses a love story to show how a blood feud locks two families together. What makes it interesting is that the hero is a doctor… Read more →

• Ten Women (On Kadın)

  Şerif Gören's film strings together short segments about women from different parts and classes of society: a villager, a bride, a… Read more →

• In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts)

  The film is inspired by the NSU's 2004 nail-bomb attack in Cologne, and that real background gives every scene its weight. The targeting of… Read more →

• Salih Without Fingers (Parmaksız Salih)

  Parmaksız Salih is an interesting document for understanding how gambling was seen as a social wound in the Turkey of 1950. Salih, who runs… Read more →

• Quo Vadis, Aida?

  The film tells of the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which the Bosnian Serb Army under General Ratko Mladić killed more than 8,300… Read more →

• Shahmaran (Şahmaran)

  The film brings the legend together with a poor but peaceful life: a coffeehouse on the Golden Horn, a grandfather who was once a treasure… Read more →

• Snow and the Bear

  The film looks at the closed social fabric of the provinces through the eyes of a young nurse sent to a remote town for her compulsory… Read more →

• The Great Spy Chase (Les Barbouzes)

  Les Barbouzes takes its name from a French slang word used in the early sixties for both counter-espionage agents and spies; that the word… Read more →

• Wild Bride (Vahşi Gelin)

  The film takes up a familiar problem of its day, marriage forced on a young woman by family pressure: Necmiye is engaged against her will… Read more →

• Germany, the Bitter Homeland (Almanya Acı Vatan)

  Germany, the Bitter Homeland is one of those films that approach the story of guest workers not with romantic longing but with bare… Read more →

• Love, Spells and All That (Aşk, Büyü vs.)

  Love, Spells and All That stands out as a Turkish film that puts a love between two women at its centre and tells it without… Read more →

• The Great Exile: Caucasus (Büyük Sürgün Kafkasya)

  Büyük Sürgün Kafkasya tells the tragedy of the Meskhetian (Ahıska) Turks, uprooted and deported in 1944, during the Second World War… Read more →

• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg)

  Behind its brightly coloured sets, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg carries the shadow of the Algerian War. Guy's call-up shows how a distant war… Read more →

• Abbas in Flower (Çiçek Abbas)

  Çiçek Abbas can be read not only as a comedy but as a film about ordinary people scraping a living in the early 1980s. The minibus route… Read more →

• Dancing Arabs - A Borrowed Identity

  Dancing Arabs - A Borrowed Identity treats the question of identity through a young man's everyday life rather than drowning it in slogans.… Read more →

• Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman (Don Juan ou Si Don Juan était une femme...)

  Retelling the Don Juan legend with the sexes reversed is, on paper, a bold idea. The film puts at its centre a woman who can steer men as… Read more →

• Hear Me (Duy Beni)

  Class is what Duy Beni is really about. Teenagers from a modest neighbourhood who have always gazed enviously at the rich kids' school… Read more →

• F Type (F Tipi Film)

  F Type deals with the move to F-type prisons after the Return to Life operation of 19 December 2000 and with the prisoners' resistance to… Read more →

• Germany 09 (Deutschland 09)

  The real question of Germany 09 is simple but weighty: how do people find their place in this country, and where do they lose their way?… Read more →

• Not Worth a Fig (İncir Çekirdeği)

  Drawing on a real life, İncir Çekirdeği tells of a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage to the husband of her dead sister. Squeezed into a… Read more →

• Sultan of My Heart (Sultan moyego serdtsa)

  Kalbimin Sultanı is best watched as a fairy tale rather than as history. Although it is set in the 19th-century Ottoman palace around a… Read more →

• Door (Kapı)

  Kapı puts a fading culture at its centre through the story of a Syriac family from Mardin. A couple who emigrated to Berlin years ago come… Read more →

• Black Executioner (Kara Cellat)

  Through a hero who squeezes money out of people doing dirty business and hands it to the poor, Kara Cellat carries the just outlaw so loved… Read more →

• The Lion Man (Kılıç Aslan)

  The film tells the Seljuk-Byzantine struggle through the idea of defending Anatolia, and it captures the spirit of mid-seventies historical… Read more →

• Le Divorce

  Le Divorce turns a divorce into an encounter between two cultures: a young American woman who comes to Paris witnesses the cultural and… Read more →

• Les Visiteurs

  Les Visiteurs turns time travel into a comedy of class. A twelfth-century count and his servant Jacquouille land at the end of the… Read more →

• Madame Bovary

  How narrow were the options for a woman from an ordinary family in 1850s Normandy? The film asks this quietly, through Emma's longings.… Read more →

• Autumn (Sonbahar)

  Sonbahar approaches hunger strikes and prison life with a political conscience but a humane eye. Yusuf, jailed as a 22-year-old student, is… Read more →

• The Story of Piera (Storia di Piera)

  The Story of Piera tells a woman's coming of age through family relationships, above all the fraught bond between mother and daughter. Its… Read more →

• The Third Page (Üçüncü Sayfa)

  The Third Page seems to take its name from the newspaper pages given over to crime reports, and it looks from the inside at the lives of… Read more →

• Unfair World

  A film set in Athens and called Unfair World is already saying something with its title. Tsitos frames a state interrogation officer's… Read more →

• The Book to Be Burned (Yakılacak Kitap)

  Yakılacak Kitap is an interesting document of how 1960s Yeşilçam looked at women. An orphaned girl passed from hand to hand, an inheritance… Read more →

• Yavuz Sultan Selim Is Crying (Yavuz Sultan Selim Ağlıyor)

  The film follows Selim I from his time as governor of Trabzon to his accession and the campaigns of Chaldiran, Marj Dabiq and Ridaniya. The… Read more →

• Zaytoun

  Zaytoun puts an Israeli pilot and a young Palestinian refugee on the same road in the hardest days of the 1982 Lebanon War. The film's gaze… Read more →

• Aaahh Belinda

  Aaahh Belinda sets the glossy promises of 1980s advertising against ordinary domestic life through an intriguing premise. A stage actress… Read more →

• Colonel Redl (Oberst Redl)

  The film follows a boy from a humble family in pre-First World War Austria-Hungary as military school carries him into the heart of the… Read more →

• The Golden Glove (Der Goldene Handschuh)

  What stayed with me was less the killer than the world around him. 1970s Hamburg, the red-light area near the Reeperbahn, a pub there… Read more →

• Carousel (Atlıkarınca)

  The film is a reminder that abuse within the family feeds above all on silence. The shifting order of a family moving from a small town to… Read more →

• Bodrum Judge (Bodrum Hakimi)

  The film starts from the life of Mefaret Tüzün, one of the Republic's first women judges, and so holds more than a love story. A young… Read more →

• C'est la vie (La Baule-les-Pins)

  Set in the summer of 1958 in a resort town on the French coast, the film shows a family coming apart within the everyday life of the… Read more →

• Dragged Across Concrete

  The film opens with footage of two cops roughing up a suspect leaking to the media, a starting point that touches a current debate about… Read more →

• Emmanuelle 2 (Emmanuelle l'antivierge)

  The Emmanuelle series can be read as a marker of the period, a way to understand where erotic cinema stood in mid-1970s European popular… Read more →

• Ridicule

  The film shows a society at Louis XVI's Versailles where reputation hangs on wordplay, and its real strength is setting that glitter… Read more →

• Facing Windows

  The film moves through ordinary middle-class life in Rome: a woman working as an accountant at a poultry-packing firm, a marriage gone… Read more →

• A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles)

  The story is set in 1919, just after the First World War, which makes it a film about the grief that begins where the fighting ends. The… Read more →

• Laila in Haifa

  Five Israeli and Palestinian women meeting in the same club on the same night in Haifa sums up the film's real subject in a sentence… Read more →

• Malkoçoğlu Kurt Bey

  The film reads Ottoman history through the comic strip rather than the textbook, and makes no secret of it. The family of Ayhan Başoğlu's… Read more →

• Malkoçoğlu Death Squads (Malkoçoğlu Ölüm Fedaileri)

  The film tells of the conflict between Ottoman raiders and the Balkan principalities in the mould of an adventure; history makes no claim… Read more →

• Le Concert

  The film's starting point is a conductor dismissed in the Soviet era for refusing to drop his Jewish musicians. That detail lifts the story… Read more →

• Run, Man, Run! (Corri uomo corri)

  Sergio Sollima framed this film as the close of his political-western trilogy and called it his most political, most revolutionary, even… Read more →

• Sold Man (Satılmış Adam)

  At the centre of Satılmış Adam is custom: a father wanting his daughter killed for being with the son of an enemy family shows how painful… Read more →

• Scene of the Crime (Le Lieu du crime)

  Téchiné reads a family coming apart in rural France through the tension between two ways of living: those who accept the stifling quiet of… Read more →

• Tatar Ramazan in Exile (Tatar Ramazan Sürgünde)

  Opening with headlines from the newspaper Cumhuriyet, the film puts us straight into 1942, with the Second World War still raging. The… Read more →

• The Abandoned (Ostavljeni)

  Ostavljeni looks at the most defenceless victims of war: children. Thirteen-year-old Alen, who lives in a children's home and wants to… Read more →

• The Salamander

  The film is built on the suspicion that a neofascist plot is being prepared in Italy, a theme that speaks directly to the political… Read more →

• We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam)

  We Have a Pope places, at the very heart of one of the world's oldest institutions, the possibility that the chosen man feels unready. It… Read more →

• The Unbreakable Man (Yıkılmayan Adam)

  Yıkılmayan Adam's subject headings read almost like the agenda of 1970s debate: the heavy-industry drive, the people's revolutionary… Read more →

• Amreeka

  By placing the migrant experience in the tense climate of post-9/11 America, Amreeka asks what it means to start a new life at precisely… Read more →

• Father Eagle (Baba Kartal)

  Baba Kartal tells the migration story of the seventies through a gangster mould. Driven from his village by the landlord's pressure, Kartal… Read more →

• Paternity (Babalık)

  Through Murat, a hospital ambulance driver whose wages cannot support his family, Babalık takes up a theme common in 1970s Turkish cinema… Read more →

• I'm Not Him (Ben O Değilim)

  Ben O Değilim centres on the loneliness of a middle-aged bachelor working in a hospital canteen. Nihat's fear of gossip shows how much… Read more →

• Berlin Alexanderplatz

  Drawing on Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel, the series portrays Berlin at the end of the 1920s. A released prisoner's attempt to live honestly… Read more →

• The Wheel (Çark)

  Çark carries the weight of a historical document as one of the first purely worker-centred films in Turkish cinema. The path from a glass… Read more →

• Choice of Arms (Le Choix des armes)

  Choice of Arms is about how hard it is for a man who has left the underworld and built an orderly life to escape his past. The theme raises… Read more →

• De l'autre côté du lit

  Beneath the film lies a fairly serious question: the invisible division of load between domestic work and working life. Ariane running a… Read more →

• Poppy (Gelincik)

  Gelincik builds the contrast between the big city and a holiday town in late-1970s Turkey through a love story. Fato, from a wealthy… Read more →

• Gulsah Little Mother (Gülşah Küçük Anne)

  The film indirectly shows how fragile a working-class family was in 1970s Turkey: a father who quits his job after being refused a raise… Read more →

• Honig im Kopf

  Honig im Kopf takes its name from a metaphor the main character uses to describe what it feels like to forget everything, and that simple… Read more →

• I Knew Her Well (Io la conoscevo bene)

  Through the story of a young woman who comes to Rome from the countryside during Italy's economic boom, the film casts a critical eye on… Read more →

• Il giovane favoloso

  Through Leopardi, the film tells of a child raised under a strict father's watch in 19th-century Italy, caught between education, parental… Read more →

• It's Hard to Be Nice (Teško je biti fin)

  Through the daily life of a taxi driver, the film portrays a time in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina when people had to rebuild their own… Read more →

• Kızım Ve Ben

  Kızım ve Ben uses the language of melodrama to explore a woman left alone and the theme of a lost child in late-1980s Turkey. A woman… Read more →

• The Conformist (Il conformista)

  Set in 1930s Italy, the film treats fascism not just as a political regime but as an outcome of the wish to look ordinary and melt into the… Read more →

• Oh, That's Fine! (Oh Olsun)

  The film portrays class difference in early-1970s Turkey through a factory owner's family and a worker's family. Punishing the rich sons by… Read more →

• Operation Dumbo Drop

  The film starts from a true story told by US Army Major Jim Morris and puts at its centre a village in 1968 Vietnam that helps American… Read more →

• Midnight at the Pera Palace (Pera Palas'ta Gece Yarısı)

  The show's most interesting move is using a real place, the Pera Palace Hotel, as a doorway into occupied-era Istanbul. Drawing on Charles… Read more →

• Septembers of Shiraz

  By centring on the arrest of a Jewish gem dealer in Tehran right after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the film shows how regime change can… Read more →

• Driver Nebahat and Her Daughter (Şoför Nebahat ve Kızı)

  The film shows plainly how class difference creates tension inside a family in 1960s Istanbul. A woman driving a dolmuş is a striking… Read more →

• The Return of Martin Guerre (Le Retour de Martin Guerre)

  Based on a real case of identity fraud in sixteenth-century France, the film shows a village world where who you are rests largely on the… Read more →

• We All Loved Each Other So Much (C'eravamo tanto amati)

  Ettore Scola's film reads Italy from 1945 to 1970 through the lives of three men and the woman caught between them. The tension between the… Read more →

• Instant Image Show (Anında Görüntü Show)

  The programme matters because it is remembered as the first to bring improvisational theatre to Turkish television. The Theatre Sports… Read more →

• Ankara Express (Ankara Ekspresi)

  The novel came out in 1946, right after the war, and the film was made six years later. Ankara Ekspresi therefore brings the fear of… Read more →

• Love Story (Aşk Hikâyesi)

  The film shows plainly how heavily class weighed on marriage decisions in the early 1970s. A relationship between a rich young man studying… Read more →

• The Vagabond (Avare)

  With keywords such as love, crisis, gang, child thief, blackmail, insult and court, the film offers a clue to how Turkish cinema of the… Read more →

• Dawn of the World (L'Aube du monde)

  The setting the film chooses is a thesis in itself: the Ahwar marshes of southern Iraq. Fahdel traces the layered destruction left by the… Read more →

• Crazy Crazy Earrings (Deli Deli Küpeli)

  Adapted from Cevat Fehmi Başkut's play Buzlar Çözülmeden, the film satirises provincial administration through two mental patients who are… Read more →

• Diaz – Don't Clean Up This Blood

  Diaz tells the story of a real police raid during the last days of the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, events often described as among the worst… Read more →

• The Dreamers

  May 1968 Paris, shaken by student unrest, is the backdrop, and the film's interesting choice is to watch that upheaval less from the… Read more →

• Sucker (Enayi)

  The film takes an interesting angle on the rich-versus-poor theme so common in 1970s Yeşilçam: this time the prejudice belongs to the poor… Read more →

• Happiness Never Comes Alone (Un bonheur n'arrive jamais seul)

  Beneath the light shell of a romantic comedy there are observations about today's European family. A woman with three children, two… Read more →

• Il Marchese del Grillo

  The film's best-remembered line, "I am who I am, and you are nobody", sums up its whole subject: a class order in which privilege does not… Read more →

• Break the Chains of Your Heart (Kır Gönlünün Zincirini)

  Arabesque cinema's class map is clear here too: on one side, a rich businessman's son who deceives a young woman with a promise of… Read more →

• Les Misérables

  What happened behind the camera is as interesting as the story itself. Being one of only four film co-productions between France and East… Read more →

• Love and Anger (Amore e rabbia)

  Shot in 1968 and shown in Berlin in 1969 as Vangelo '70, the film is one of cinema's direct traces of the ferment of the late sixties. Its… Read more →

• Marco Polo

  Marco Polo's journey is one of the best-known stories of trade and curiosity between East and West, and fittingly the series itself was the… Read more →

• Marquise

  The film is inspired by Marquise-Thérèse de Gorla, a real seventeenth-century actress and dancer, which makes it interesting as a period… Read more →

• The Lovers of Montparnasse (Montparnasse 19)

  The film is set in Montparnasse in 1919, just after the First World War, so it is a portrait not only of a painter but of an artists'… Read more →

• Paparazzi

  The film is interesting as a product of the early 2000s, reflecting how hard-edged the tension between celebrities and the tabloid press… Read more →

• Place Vendôme

  The film uses Place Vendôme, regarded as the heart of the Paris jewellery trade, not merely as a location but as the symbol of a whole… Read more →

• Il Postino: The Postman

  By pairing a poet exiled for his political views with the postman of a small island, the film explores the distance between education… Read more →

• Rana's Wedding

  The film's real strength is that it conveys a political situation not through grand statements but through one ordinary goal pursued over a… Read more →

• Section spéciale

  The special courts set up in 1941 in German-occupied France are among the darkest pages of the Vichy regime, and the film tells this real… Read more →

• The Last Train (Der letzte Zug)

  There are many Holocaust films; what sets this one apart is that it fits the deportation of the last Jews left in Berlin into a single… Read more →

• Summer Book (Tatil Kitabı)

  Telling of one summer in a family of lemon merchants in Silifke, the film puts provincial paternal authority and the handing down of a… Read more →

• The Fascist (Il federale)

  As its title suggests, this film looks at fascism through comedy, and it was made only about fifteen years after the war ended. That timing… Read more →

• The Limits of Control

  The film centres on a stranger who crosses a whole country yet belongs nowhere, and in that sense it can be read as a parable about… Read more →

• The Two Faces of January

  The film is set in 1962, and it conveys the period through its point of view as much as through costume. The class gap between a wealthy… Read more →

• Wrong Rosary (Uzak İhtimal)

  The film's most interesting choice is its neighbourhood. Galata, once a Christian quarter and home to many cultures, is an almost… Read more →

• The Man Without a Tomorrow (Yarınsız Adam)

  Made in 1976, the film looks at the gulf between rich and poor in Turkey through the eyes of a man pushed into crime, which makes it a… Read more →

• Agries Melisses

  The series centres on three women fighting to hold on to their land after losing their father, and in doing so it opens a good window onto… Read more →

• Augustine

  The film is at its strongest when it centres the question of who received a diagnosis of 'hysteria' in nineteenth-century France, and how.… Read more →

• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie)

  The film stages upper-class etiquette as a ritual: the dinners meant for chatting about fashion, politics and gossip are how this class… Read more →

• Stolen Eyes (Çalıntı Gözler)

  Stolen Eyes is set against the so-called Revival Process, which forced Bulgaria's Turks to change their names in the 1980s, and the fact… Read more →

• Confessions of a Police Captain (Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica)

  In depicting an order where the state and the mafia are entangled, the film opens its deepest wound through the killing of a union leader.… Read more →

• Conversation Piece (Gruppo di famiglia in un interno)

  Visconti also saw the film as an allegory of the bourgeoisie's decay and its defencelessness in the face of fascism, and that intent can be… Read more →

• Delirious

  The film takes a close look at the fame economy of the mid-2000s: a paparazzo chasing celebrities, a homeless young man who wants to act… Read more →

• Das Experiment

  The reason Das Experiment still gets talked about is its question of how easily authority is internalised. Ordinary volunteers, there for… Read more →

• Emma Hamilton (Lady Hamilton - Zwischen Schmach und Liebe)

  The film portrays two people who really lived, Lord Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton, but its partial basis in Alexandre Dumas's novel La… Read more →

• Confessions of a Lady Cop (La poliziotta fa carriera)

  Even the Turkish title, which translates roughly as "Worse Than a Man", sums up the attitude of its day: a woman in uniform is measured by… Read more →

• Flic Story

  The story is set in Paris in 1947, just after the war, and centres on a clash of methods inside the police: colleagues who rely on brute… Read more →

• I as in Icarus (I... comme Icare)

  The film's clever choice is to draw heavily on the Kennedy assassination while moving the events to an unnamed Western country. That… Read more →

• Backstabbing for Beginners (Komplo)

  Backstabbing for Beginners tells the real corruption scandal of the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme for Iraq, working from Michael… Read more →

• Scary Movie 5

  Scary Movie 5 can be read as a map of 2013 pop culture. Its targets sum up that year's horror and thriller box office, while guests such as… Read more →

• The Insider

  The question that keeps the film relevant is what wins when a news organisation's editorial line collides with its financial interests. The… Read more →

• The Kingdom (Operation: Kingdom)

  Although it calls itself fiction, the film draws on real attacks in Khobar and Riyadh, which places on it a heavier responsibility than it… Read more →

• Las 13 rosas

  Las 13 rosas tells the true story of thirteen young women handed the heaviest sentence in the first days of the Franco regime, right after… Read more →

• Lili Marleen

  The most thought-provoking side of Lili Marleen is the place of popular culture in wartime. While one song is loved by German and Allied… Read more →

• March or Die

  The film builds a story that celebrates the French Foreign Legion and its 1920s world, and from today's vantage point that is exactly what… Read more →

• Mocro Maffia

  What stands out most is how the show turns a real criminal network into drama, working from the book by journalists Wouter Laumans and… Read more →

• Offroad

  The film tells, as comedy, the story of a woman from a small town like Geilenkirchen who decides to rebuild her life after her fiancé's… Read more →

• Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi)

  The film's censorship history is a social document in its own right. An X rating in the US at first, a trimmed R version in 1981 and the… Read more →

• Private Practice

  It is no small detail that the story is set not in a public hospital but in a private clinic founded by friends. Called first Oceanside… Read more →

• Quo Vadis?

  The most interesting thing about the story is that it shows two worlds meeting in Nero's Rome through a love affair. The bond between a… Read more →

• Sex Quartet (Le fate)

  The film is made up of four stories that put their female characters in front, a notable choice for 1966. But the titles that changed from… Read more →

• Shirli-Myrli

  What sets Shirli-Myrli apart from an ordinary mix-up comedy is that it aims its laughter at a wound in 1990s Russia. The idea of identical… Read more →

• The Players (Les Infidèles)

  The question the film asks is a serious one: can a marriage survive without fidelity, and why would someone who cannot be monogamous marry… Read more →

• Train of Life (Train de vie)

  The film centres on a Jewish village in Eastern Europe in 1941 and in doing so puts on screen a whole way of life on the brink of… Read more →

• Trop c'est trop

  That the three heroes are born just as the war is ending is a small but telling detail: in 1975, when the postwar generation was reaching… Read more →

• Vermist

  Vermist is a good example of how a series from a small language market can cross borders. Filmed in Flemish Dutch and made by a Belgian… Read more →

• We Are All Murderers (Nous sommes tous des assassins)

  Cayatte's film is an early and bold intervention by cinema in the debate over the death penalty. René's story takes the problem beyond the… Read more →

• What a Man

  What is most interesting about the film is how it turns the early-2010s confusion over what masculinity means into comic material. The… Read more →

• 8½ (Otto e mezzo)

  8½ portrays the inner world of a successful man in early-1960s Italy through a mirror made of the women around him: his wife, his mistress… Read more →

• The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain)

  The film is set in Paris after May '68, and in my view its greatest value is the way it catches, in conversations at café tables, what was… Read more →

• Augustine: The Decline of the Roman Empire (Sant'Agostino)

  The production's most interesting choice is to set a personal story of transformation beside the fall of an empire. Augustine's search… Read more →

• Beyond the Sea (Beyond the Sea – Musik war sein Leben)

  The film opens a window onto American entertainment in the 1950s and 1960s, an era when records, cinema and fame were intertwined and a… Read more →

• Blutzbrudaz

  Directed by the German-Turkish filmmaker Özgür Yıldırım, with Fatih Akın among its producers and rappers such as Alpa Gun in the cast, the… Read more →

• Borgia

  Borgia looks at the system of power behind the Renaissance's glittering artistic face. The story of Rodrigo Borgia, elected pope as… Read more →

• The Grand Budapest Hotel

  The film may be set in an imaginary country, but its background is entirely real: Europe between the two world wars and the rise of… Read more →

• The Misfortunates (De helaasheid der dingen)

  The film treats poverty not merely as a lack of money but as a way of life handed down from one generation to the next. In the male world… Read more →

• Colours of Time (La Venue de l'avenir)

  There is a meaningful bridge between the two moments the film chooses. 1895 is when the rise of photography began to change images and… Read more →

• Europa

  Through an idealistic young man who returns to Germany just after the war, the film looks at the moral wreckage of a defeated country.… Read more →

• Grange Hill

  What makes Grange Hill valuable is that it puts an ordinary state school at its centre. Instead of elite boarding schools, the classrooms… Read more →

• Jupiter's Moon (Jupiter holdja)

  The film goes straight at Europe's refugee question: a young Syrian shot at the Hungarian border struggles to build a new life even after… Read more →

• Lagaan

  Lagaan's cleverness lies in fitting a colonial relationship into a cricket match. Villagers crushed by drought and heavy taxes standing up… Read more →

• Let Joy Reign Supreme (Que la fête commence)

  The film goes back to the Regency years in France at the start of the eighteenth century and takes up a real event, the Pontcallec… Read more →

• Liberation (Osvobozhdeniye)

  Liberation is best read not as a history lesson but as a record of a period's official memory. Finishing the first part in time for the… Read more →

• November (Noviembre)

  The question Noviembre asks reaches well beyond its own time: can art survive outside the market? A troupe that refuses payment on… Read more →

• Pan Am

  The series portrays the early 1960s, as the jet age began, through a world in which being a stewardess was seen as a symbol of freedom and… Read more →

• The Anarchist's Wife (Die Frau des Anarchisten)

  Telling the Spanish Civil War not from the front but through a woman waiting at home is a valuable choice among films about the period.… Read more →

• The Blood of Others (Le Sang des autres)

  Many films about Paris under German occupation turn the Resistance into a tale of heroism; The Blood of Others instead puts forward the… Read more →

• The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme)

  That France and Italy came together on a costume drama in 1948, right after the war, is remarkable in itself: the film industries of two… Read more →

• The Loner (Le Solitaire)

  The Loner's story is more instructive for the change happening off screen than for the cop thriller on it. A star who had driven… Read more →

• The Promise

  The Promise openly says it was made to raise awareness rather than money, and timing its US release to the anniversary of the week the… Read more →

• The Serpent Queen

  The series is adapted from Leonie Frieda's biography of Catherine de' Medici, but you should know from the start that it takes wide… Read more →

• The Thief of Paris (Le Voleur)

  Setting the story in turn-of-the-century Paris is meaningful; Georges Darien wrote his novel in 1897, from inside the very era it depicts.… Read more →

• Themroc

  A French worker in 1973 turning his back on modern society, work and order, and becoming a caveman in the middle of the city, is a harsh… Read more →

• Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train)

  The film treats the funeral as a social ritual: a painter's death brings together, in one place, the web of former lovers, friends and… Read more →

• A Long Ride from Hell (Vivo per la tua morte)

  The film is a good case study in how 1960s Italian popular cinema worked. Muscle-bound peplum heroes were moving into a new genre, the… Read more →

• Afife Jale

  The film centres on what it meant for a Muslim woman to appear on stage in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. More than one artist's… Read more →

• Alexandre le bienheureux

  The film carries the spirit of 1968 to the edge of a field. In a village where work counts as a virtue, a man downing tools is like a calm… Read more →

• Superior to Love (Aşktan da Üstün)

  The film tells the National Struggle less through the front than through hidden identities and inner divisions: the line between sultan… Read more →

• Betty Blue (37°2 le matin)

  Betty Blue is the story of two people living on the edge of the system in 1980s France: Zorg works on beach bungalows and tries to write in… Read more →

• Bombshell Girl (Bomba Gibi Kız)

  The film's most interesting detail is why Erol is pushed into cheating at cards: nobody wants to hire a drifter. The gap between the… Read more →

• Let the Instruments Play, Let the Girls Dance (Çalsın Sazlar, Oynasın Kızlar)

  The cast list alone reads like a period document: the gazel singer Sebilci Hüseyin on one side, the İstanbul Samba Orchestra on the other.… Read more →

• The Wound of the Tongue (Dil Yarası)

  Socially, the most striking thing about the film is that it presents revenge not as one man's rage but as a family duty handed down from… Read more →

• The Döngel Workshop (Döngel Karhanesi)

  The target is not the brothel itself but the institutions that try to run it: the bank, the fund, the Ministry and the civil servant sent… Read more →

• Elaha

  The film looks at a young Kurdish-German woman caught between two worlds through something as intimate as the expectation of virginity.… Read more →

• School for Love (Futures Vedettes)

  The 1950s French art school is where the film's young people, stepping into adulthood, search for both talent and identity. Seen from… Read more →

• The Shadowless (Gölgesizler)

  The film's village is on no map; a story without place or time turns it into a model of society rather than a specific location. The Muhtar… Read more →

• Four Women in the Harem (Haremde Dört Kadın)

  The film tells the unravelling of the late Ottoman years by fitting it inside a pasha's mansion, and it does so very cleverly. Sadık Pasha… Read more →

• Dream and Reality (Hayal ve Gerçek)

  The plot leans on two familiar family customs: a mother having her say in her son's marriage, and a younger sister being unable to marry… Read more →

• Caliphate (Kalifat)

  The starting point is real: the Bethnal Green case, three teenage girls who met jihadist recruiters at their London school and left for… Read more →

• This Is My Story (İşte Bu Benim Masalım)

  İşte Bu Benim Masalım belongs to the period when digital platforms in Turkey were racing to produce local content. Casting a pop star in… Read more →

• Joan of Arcadia

  It is striking that American mainstream television in the early 2000s put faith this close to the centre. The show places God not in a… Read more →

• Tarzan of Manisa (Manisa Tarzanı)

  The film follows a man trying to make a burned city green again in 1924 Manisa, still scarred by the War of Independence, and it is based… Read more →

• Marienhof

  What makes Marienhof interesting is that a pre-evening soap carried homelessness, homosexuality, AIDS, drug addiction and suicide into an… Read more →

• Marziye

  In the show's world, the farm and wealth are not just a backdrop but the real force shaping relationships. A man who left his home years… Read more →

• The Season Has Blossomed (Mevsim Çiçek Açtı)

  The film tackles violence against women through an immigrant family in Germany and doesn't leave it as a purely domestic drama: the state's… Read more →

• Recep İvedik

  Writing Recep İvedik off as a crude comedy misses what it reveals about Turkey at the time. A film that drew over 3 million admissions in… Read more →

• Return of Sabata (È tornato Sabata... hai chiuso un'altra volta)

  The film is set in a small Texas town in the years after the Civil War, and making a former Confederate officer the hero reflects the… Read more →

• Sapphire (Safir)

  Socially, the show's most interesting question is who holds authority in one of Cappadocia's leading families. The grandson who refused to… Read more →

• A Magnificent Haunting (Magnifica presenza)

  Magnifica presenza tells a story of migration and of trying to gain a foothold in the big city through an elegant metaphor. Pietro, who… Read more →

• The Intruder (L'Intrus)

  The most thought-provoking thing about the film is that it centres on a man who turns to an illegal heart transplant to survive. The… Read more →

• Tricycle (Üç Tekerlekli Bisiklet)

  At the centre of the story is a washerwoman whose husband has been missing for three years and who is trying to stand on her own feet with… Read more →

• The Wild One (Yaban)

  The story follows a man wounded in wartime, the bond he forms with the young woman who heals him and the life of intrigue that follows; a… Read more →

• My Lying Sweetheart (Yalancı Yarim)

  The film rests on an axis common in Turkish comedy of the seventies: the playboy son of a wealthy family and the daughter of a market… Read more →

• Family Woman (Aile Kadını)

  The tension between the title and the story is striking: the peace of Pınar, seen as a 'family woman', depends on hiding her past. The film… Read more →

• Anatomy of a Marriage: My Days with Françoise (Françoise ou la Vie conjugale)

  For 1964, devoting an entire film to a marriage's collapse from the wife's point of view was a notable decision. The mid-sixties were the… Read more →

• Attila

  In Turkey, Attila is usually remembered as the great ruler of Hun history. The film's original Italian title, by contrast, calls him "the… Read more →

• Battle of the Brave (Nouvelle-France)

  Quebec in the first years of British military occupation is fertile ground for portraying a society caught between French and British… Read more →

• Contraband (Luca il contrabbandiere)

  The film centres on a Naples where contraband cigarettes look almost like an ordinary way to earn a living; the hero's comfortable life… Read more →

• Men (Erkekler)

  The film's starting question, why men cheat, is a familiar curiosity in Turkish comedy. What stands out here is that it is framed as a… Read more →

• The Wedding Singer

  Putting weddings at the centre is an interesting choice: marriage here is both a way of earning a living and a life stage everyone is… Read more →

• Fear City

  The title comes from the brochures the New York Police Department handed out to warn about crime in the city, a detail that ties the film… Read more →

• King of Doormen (Kapıcılar Kralı)

  Kapıcılar Kralı tells the years of accelerating migration from Anatolia to Istanbul from inside a large apartment building, and the choice… Read more →

• Kerr

  Made in 2021, a film about a town cut off by an outbreak and sealed by a countrywide curfew is hard to read apart from the lockdown days of… Read more →

• The Queen (Kraliçe)

  Kraliçe adapts the American series Queen Sugar, and the interesting question is how family land and inheritance translate into a Turkish… Read more →

• Le Miracle des loups

  The film sets the real feud between Louis XI and Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in the background and puts an invented love story in… Read more →

• Billionaire (Milyarder)

  The film starts from a sharp social observation: in the 1980s, big lottery winners tried to hide who they were. That impulse shows how… Read more →

• Muriel (Muriel ou le Temps d'un retour)

  Muriel has to be placed in its own time: it was made when the Algerian War had only just ended and was still a contested subject in France.… Read more →

• Pardon Mon Affaire (Un éléphant ça trompe énormément)

  The film holds a mirror to French middle-class masculinity in the seventies: four men in their forties whose private lives are a mess. In… Read more →

• Peppermint Soda (Diabolo menthe)

  The film portrays Paris in 1963-64 through two sisters and the mother raising them alone, which already sets it outside the usual family… Read more →

• Quantum of Solace

  The film's most interesting choice is to dress its villain up as an environmentalist. A coup plotted over fresh water, instead of oil or a… Read more →

• Rebel

  Rebel tries to see radicalisation not only from the front line but from inside the home of a Muslim family living in Belgium. A young man… Read more →

• Reclaim Your Brain (Free Rainer – Dein Fernseher lügt)

  The film questions the effect of ratings-driven television on viewers in the mid-2000s and takes one step further: the claim that low… Read more →

• Remember Me, My Love (Ricordati di me)

  What is most interesting here is how the parents' abandoned dreams split along gender lines. The man who wanted to write chose the security… Read more →

• Breathless (À bout de souffle)

  By pairing a French drifter with a young American working for the New York Herald Tribune in 1960 Paris, the film also registers the weight… Read more →

• Soldier of Fortune (Il soldato di ventura)

  The Challenge of Barletta is a symbol of honour in Italian national memory, and Ettore Fieramosca a folk hero. That the film treats this… Read more →

• Dry Summer (Susuz Yaz)

  Susuz Yaz brought the tension between a shared rural resource and private property to the screen early and boldly. When a farmer tries to… Read more →

• La Dolce Vita

  The film catches the rise of celebrity culture and the gossip press at its very start. It is no accident that the word paparazzi comes from… Read more →

• Upside-Down World (Tersine Dünya)

  Adapted from Orhan Kemal's novel, the film makes the familiar order strange by turning gender roles upside down. Women as the neighbourhood… Read more →

• That Most Important Thing: Love (L'important c'est d'aimer)

  The film shows French show business through the eyes of a B-list actress, from the lower rungs of the system, which makes the tension… Read more →

• The Brand New Testament (Le Tout Nouveau Testament)

  As much as it can be taken as religious satire, the film is also an observation on the loneliness of modern city people. The girl choosing… Read more →

• The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le Crime de monsieur Lange)

  The film carries the mood of the year the Popular Front marched to a major election victory. Staff running the firm as a cooperative in the… Read more →

• The Sorrow of Mrs. Schneider (Trishtimi i zonjës Shnajder)

  Through the eyes of an Albanian film student in 1961 Prague, the film tries to make visible the gap between two societies of the same era.… Read more →

• Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt)

  A 1991 film imagining the turn of the millennium is a time capsule in its own right. Fear of catastrophe sitting side by side with… Read more →

• Z

  The film tells the story of the 1963 assassination of a leftist Greek politician in fictionalised form, but its real target is the… Read more →

• 24

  24 often presents its hero's rule-bending in the name of the cause as a justified necessity. That is why its depiction of torture in… Read more →

• A Man in Love (Un homme amoureux)

  In the background of the film lies a tension between two film cultures. The Italian art-film offer that the agent opposes out of concern… Read more →

• Family Honor (Aile Şerefi)

  The film draws a poor working family of the 1970s in concrete terms: a father who sells from a cart, children working in a factory and a… Read more →

• My Mother (Mia madre)

  What makes the film socially interesting is the quiet question of whose shoulders the burden of care falls on. A woman director making the… Read more →

• Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (Astérix et Obélix : Mission Cléopâtre)

  The premise rests on a surprisingly serious idea: Cleopatra sets out to prove that her people are no lesser civilisation than Rome. An… Read more →

• When Father Was Away on Business (Otac na službenom putu)

  The Informbiro years that followed Tito's 1948 break with Stalin may mean little to today's viewers. The film doesn't teach them as a… Read more →

• Barfuss

  The film's starting point is the growing closeness between a young woman who has escaped from a psychiatric hospital and a man who runs… Read more →

• Breaking the Waves

  The early-1970s community of the Scottish Highlands where the story unfolds is a quiet but decisive character in its own right. A naive… Read more →

• Dervish Bey (Derviş Bey)

  The film treats the blood feud not as individual rage but as an institution that shapes every relationship in a village. The agha sending… Read more →

• Bottom (Dip)

  Dip sets up its hero as someone in a police-affiliated unit who helps people at risk of suicide, an unusual starting point for a local… Read more →

• Elsa & Fred (Elsa y Fred)

  The film treats old age not as a waiting room but as a stage of life where choices can still be made, and that alone is a stance. The… Read more →

• The Gendarme of Saint-Tropez (Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez)

  This comedy captures the years when Saint-Tropez, with its yachts, beaches and hectic summer season, was coming into its own as a holiday… Read more →

• Black Sea

  The real story behind the film is economic: a captain pushed out of the salvage company he worked for over many years, and the crew he puts… Read more →

• A Funny Love Story (Komik Bir Aşk Hikayesi)

  By putting disability at the centre of a romantic comedy, the film steps into territory Turkish cinema does not often explore. Atilla… Read more →

• La Boum

  La Boum became a social phenomenon in France, drawing over 4.3 million admissions there and about 15 million across Europe. Behind that… Read more →

• Life Is Tough (La vita, a volte, è molto dura, vero Provvidenza?)

  An Italian western co-produced by France, Italy and West Germany is a small record of how European popular cinema worked in the early… Read more →

• Madame Sans-Gêne

  What makes this film interesting is less the film alone than the chain it belongs to: a play staged in 1893 inspires a novel and turns into… Read more →

• Murtaza

  Murtaza lets you read the triangle of migration, shanty housing and the factory in 1960s Turkey through a single character. A Rumelian… Read more →

• My Mother's Castle (Le Château de ma mère)

  Pagnol's childhood memories can also be read as a social portrait recording the everyday life of a family in provincial France. The film… Read more →

• My New Partner (Les Ripoux)

  By portraying police corruption not with anger but as an everyday trade, the film says something interesting about the Paris of its day… Read more →

• Nine

  The most debatable aspect of the film, socially, is how it positions its women. Wife, mistress, muse, confidante, journalist, Saraghina… Read more →

• Rang De Basanti

  The film's most interesting idea is holding up the story of independence revolutionaries as a mirror to today's young people. Carefree… Read more →

• Roma

  The film tells a city's history not in chronological order but in layers. When the brothels of the Mussolini era and a variety show in the… Read more →

• The Milky Way (La Voie lactée)

  It matters that the heroes are two vagabonds: doctrinal disputes that occupied church authority for centuries are seen through the eyes of… Read more →

• Santa Claus Is a Stinker (Le père Noël est une ordure)

  The film's satire takes aim at the show of goodness on Christmas Eve: a helpline listening to people in crisis, its volunteers and the lost… Read more →

• Chauffeur (Şoför)

  The film shows plainly how, in 1970s Turkey, a family's livelihood could rest on one man's shoulders, here a truck driver who spends long… Read more →

• Survivor Turkey (Survivor Türkiye)

  Survivor Türkiye's run of more than twenty years is a good lens on where television culture has gone. The Celebrities versus Volunteers… Read more →

• The Albanian (Shqiptari)

  The film talks about migration in figures rather than big words: a ten-thousand-euro bride price, a six-month deadline, barely twenty euros… Read more →

• The Cop (Un condé)

  What happened around the film tells as much about its era as the film itself. Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin's attempt to have it… Read more →

• The Married Couple of the Year Two (Les Mariés de l'an II)

  Telling the French Revolution not through great leaders but through a couple who want a divorce is a smart choice. The Revolution brings… Read more →

• The Tattoo (Le Tatoué)

  At its core the story mocks a world where art has become a commodity: an art dealer will stop at nothing to buy a Modigliani tattoo off a… Read more →

• The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort)

  The film holds an optimistic mirror up to 1960s provincial France. One twin teaches piano, the other dance: they are drawn as young women… Read more →

• Flightplan (Flightplan – Ohne jede Spur)

  The film turns the anxiety that settled over air travel after 9/11 directly into material: a sealed cabin, suspicion moving between… Read more →

• A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël)

  What makes the film interesting is how it shows the family as a web of obligations. A son cut off from the family over a debt his sister… Read more →

• A Difficult Life (Una vita difficile)

  The film fits the Italy that runs from wartime poverty and the end of fascism to the founding of the Republic and the rise of the Communist… Read more →

• Agent 3S3: Massacre in the Sun (Agente 3S3, massacro al sole)

  The film is a typical product of the spy craze that swept European cinema in the mid-1960s. Being an Italian-French-Spanish co-production… Read more →

• Oh Beautiful Istanbul (Ah Güzel İstanbul)

  Ah Güzel İstanbul takes on one of the liveliest debates of the 1960s, the clash between alaturka and alafranga, through a love story and… Read more →

• I Miss You Too (Ben de Özledim)

  The film bears the marks of the years when arabesk was becoming the emotional world of the city. Details such as promissory notes, a rented… Read more →

• The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex)

  The first decade of the Red Army Faction, from 1967 to the German Autumn, covers one of the deepest ruptures in post-war West Germany, and… Read more →

• For a Few Beautiful Days (Birkaç Güzel Gün İçin)

  The film's premise is a father deciding through his will whom his daughter will marry. In eighties melodrama a woman's fate was often drawn… Read more →

• Christine

  Love between a young woman and a lieutenant is a favourite pattern of period drama; in such stories the uniform often brings a gap in… Read more →

• De Gaulle: Tilting Iron (La Bataille de Gaulle : L'Âge de fer)

  The film tells France's 1940 collapse and armistice through the stubborn resistance a general with no army and no backing launches from… Read more →

• Dogville

  Although it is set in 1930s America, the film's real subject is a model of community rather than a particular era. Tying a fugitive's… Read more →

• The Grifters

  The film depicts a world where trust is bought and sold like a commodity. The word grifter itself names a swindler who wins the victim's… Read more →

• Anxiety (Endişe)

  Endişe's strength lies in setting one family's drama inside the labour relations of Çukurova. Placing the farmworkers' strike next to… Read more →

• Fack ju Göhte 2

  The film puts the race for school rankings at the heart of its comedy: partnering with a school abroad becomes a matter of points rather… Read more →

• Free Men (Les Hommes libres)

  Free Men turns to a subject cinema has rarely tackled: the part Muslims of North African origin played in the Resistance and in protecting… Read more →

• Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud)

  Elevator to the Gallows takes a cold look at the French city life of its day: an employee who disguises his employer's death as suicide, an… Read more →

• Iznogoud

  Iznogoud's Baghdad is not a real city but a fairy-tale land drawn from Europe's popular image of the Arabian Nights. Such an Orientalist… Read more →

• Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds (Karpuz Kabuğundan Gemiler Yapmak)

  Through two youths shuttling between village and town in 1960s Anatolia, the film conveys the social texture of the period. Spending their… Read more →

• King & Conqueror

  The series digs into the roots of a clash that would shape a country and a continent for a thousand years, an ambitious choice of subject.… Read more →

• Lady L

  Lady L's life is an unusual story of climbing from a Paris brothel into high society. One of her two great loves being an idealistic… Read more →

• Lonesome Dove

  Centring on retired Texas Rangers makes the series feel less like a founding legend than a reflection on the end of an era: men who once… Read more →

• Musallat 2 (Musallat 2: Lanet)

  The film aims to treat belief in sorcery not just as horror material but as a social phenomenon to be questioned. The team meeting people… Read more →

• New York, I Love You

  The film's most interesting side is that New York's five boroughs are told through the eyes of a wide range of directors, from Jiang Wen to… Read more →

• Nirvana

  Nirvana carries the anxieties of a time when the internet and virtual reality games were only just entering daily life. It brings two… Read more →

• Not Here to Be Loved (Je ne suis pas là pour être aimé)

  The film looks at midlife loneliness within the everyday routine of the French middle class. Making Jean-Claude a bailiff is a meaningful… Read more →

• Rina

  The question the film asks touches an anxiety familiar to the urban middle class of the 2000s: owning a home, a car and a career yet never… Read more →

• Round Midnight

  By building 1950s Paris through the eyes of an African-American jazz musician, the film recalls a time when many Black American artists… Read more →

• Stranger in the House (L'inconnu dans la maison)

  Courtroom films are one of the most direct ways of staging how a society views crime and justice. Adapting a novel published in 1940 to the… Read more →

• The Patriots (Les Patriotes)

  The title carries the story's most contentious question: which definition of patriotism covers a young Frenchman serving another country's… Read more →

• The Poppy Is Also a Flower (Opération Opium)

  The film is a telling example of how an international organisation wanted to present itself to the public in the mid-1960s. The drug… Read more →

• The Trojan Horse (La guerra di Troia)

  The film is a typical example of the early-1960s peplum wave, when Italian cinema served up ancient myths as entertainment for a mass… Read more →

• Velvet

  Choosing a fashion house as the setting is a smart way to read late-1950s Spain through class relations. The romance between the store's… Read more →

• Rising Sun

  Centring on a murder committed just as Japanese and American business interests sit down to make a deal, the film reflects the anxieties of… Read more →

• 125 (125, rue Montmartre)

  Putting a newspaper seller at the centre is a way of looking at late-1950s Paris from below. Montmartre here comes across, I think, less as… Read more →

• Buffalo Soldiers (Army Go Home!)

  The film's timing is a story in itself. Setting it in 1989 on an American base in West Germany, just before the Berlin Wall fell, opens a… Read more →

• Ablaze (Alev Alev)

  At the heart of the series are three women from different social worlds, each looking for her own way after a shared disaster. The setup… Read more →

• Ali and Nino (Ali ve Nino)

  Ali and Nino treats Azerbaijan on the eve of the First World War as a threshold where cultures, faiths and languages meet. The love between… Read more →

• American Gangster

  The film sets the Harlem of the Vietnam War years against a background that shows how the war became entangled with the drug trade. Heroin… Read more →

• Andaz Apna Apna

  The fortune-hunting that sets the film in motion shows how strong the pull of wealth and climbing the social ladder was as a theme in… Read more →

• Prisoner of Love (Aşk Mahkumu)

  The film follows a pattern common in Turkish melodrama of the seventies: a man who has badly wronged a woman realizes he loves her only… Read more →

• Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia (Astérix et Obélix : Au service de Sa Majesté)

  The core idea of Asterix is a small community that refuses to bow to a vast empire, and this film carries that idea from Gaul to Britain.… Read more →

• Asterix & Obelix Take On Caesar (Astérix et Obélix contre César)

  Asterix and Obelix vs. Caesar can be read as an attempt to show that European cinema could compete in big-budget popular filmmaking too. A… Read more →

• The Sister-in-Law (Baldız)

  It is no accident that Baldız's hero is a man returning to his village after working in Germany: by the mid-1970s, labour migration abroad… Read more →

• Beyond Dreams (Dröm vidare)

  The film is set in Alby, Botkyrka, and that is no accident: it asks how friendship, loyalty and identity take shape in the gap between the… Read more →

• Big Sur

  The film focuses on the period when one of the best-known Beat writers was worn down by sudden fame and drink, and in that sense it invites… Read more →

• A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari)

  A Fistful of Dollars is a striking example of how cultures travel through cinema: Kurosawa's Yojimbo, set in Japan, moves to a Mexican… Read more →

• Coup de tête

  The film captures well how football becomes a field of power in a small town: the team, jobs and reputation are all concentrated in the… Read more →

• Criminal Minds

  The interesting thing about the show is that it treats crime not as a forensic puzzle but as human behaviour. The profilers' focus on the… Read more →

• The Danish Girl

  The film's most interesting choice is to tell Lili Elbe's story from inside a marriage. That way it reads not only as one person's search… Read more →

• Coup (Darbe)

  Darbe carries the social tensions of the mid-seventies straight into its story: factory life, union organising, a strike and injustice. The… Read more →

• Der Schuh des Manitu

  The film looks at the Karl May adaptations of the 1960s, especially the Winnetou films with Pierre Brice and Lex Barker, through parody. It… Read more →

• The Big Blue (Le Grand Bleu)

  The thing to keep in mind with Le Grand Bleu is that, although it draws on real names, it is not a biography. Jacques Mayol and Enzo… Read more →

• The Longest Day

  That a film made less than twenty years after the war tells the Normandy landings from the German side as well as the American, British and… Read more →

• Fabiola

  What makes Fabiola interesting is that it shows fourth-century Rome, as Christianity was rising, through the filter of a novel a cardinal… Read more →

• Stealth

  When the film was made in 2005, an artificial intelligence flying an autonomous fighter was a science-fiction device; today it is a real… Read more →

• The Sob (Hıçkırık)

  Hıçkırık is a story built on adoption, stepfamilies and social climbing. A boy raised in hardship in Adapazarı joins a well-off Istanbul… Read more →

• Hotel Mondial

  The choice of setting carries a social observation. Schwerin is presented as an unglamorous city to which the hotel group sends Eva de… Read more →

• House of Saddam

  The show's most striking choice is to tell the Saddam Hussein years through his family and inner circle rather than the front line or the… Read more →

• Isabel

  In telling the period when Spain took shape as a united kingdom, Isabel cannot avoid some of history's most contested pages: the… Read more →

• Kolpaçino 3. Devre

  Kolpaçino 3 can be read as a typical product of the 2010s Turkish box-office comedy economy: a well-known franchise, broad celebrity… Read more →

• Save Me (Kurtar Beni)

  Kurtar Beni centres on an encounter unusual for Turkish cinema: a woman who earns her living as a prostitute and the imam of a mosque. The… Read more →

• The Leopard (Le Guépard)

  The film portrays 1860 Sicily, as Italian unification takes shape, through the window of the aristocracy, reading a historical… Read more →

• Article 438 (Madde 438)

  Taking its name straight from an article of the Turkish Penal Code is a striking choice for a film. Article 438 softened the sentence for… Read more →

• The Masked Turkey (Maske Kimsin Sen?)

  Maske Kimsin Sen? shows how television formats travel: an idea born in South Korea as King of Mask Singer reached Turkey after being… Read more →

• Miral

  Miral tells the story of post-1948 Jerusalem through the eyes of a young Palestinian woman and focuses on how conflict shapes children and… Read more →

• My American Uncle (Mon oncle d'Amérique)

  The film's bold claim is that, when it comes to survival, struggle and depression, people behave socially much like laboratory rats. Its… Read more →

• Napoleon

  The series' most interesting historical choice is to show Napoleon neither as hero nor monster but as a man open to the influence of those… Read more →

• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

  Opening with children evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz ties the fairy tale to a real historical wound. The rupture experienced… Read more →

• First and Foremost, the Homeland (Önce Vatan)

  Önce Vatan brought the Cyprus landing to the screen while it was still very fresh, so it documents the mood of those days more than the… Read more →

• One Thousand Dollars on the Black (1000 dollari sul nero)

  The film shows clearly how, by the mid-1960s, the spaghetti western had become an international industrial product. An Italian and West… Read more →

• Recep İvedik 4

  Recep İvedik 4 drawing over 7 million admissions says less about the film than about Turkey's entertainment habits in the 2010s. A series… Read more →

• Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli)

  Rocco and His Brothers is one of cinema's most powerful works about internal migration. The story of the Parondi family, fleeing southern… Read more →

• RocknRolla

  The film's sharpest idea is to centre on a moment when big money in London came from property rather than drugs. An old-school gangster… Read more →

• The Yellow Rolls-Royce

  What makes the film interesting is the social range it draws through the car's owners: an English aristocrat, a Miami gangster and a… Read more →

• Street Girl (Sokak Kızı)

  The film sets up the tension between capital and neighbourhood in 1960s Istanbul in a very clear scheme: two factory owners plan to merge… Read more →

• Spartacus

  The film draws on the Third Servile War of 73-71 BC, so it depicts a real uprising against slavery, though it dramatises it through… Read more →

• Let's Hope It's a Girl (Speriamo che sia femmina)

  The film looks at the transformation of the family through women's eyes. A divorced former aristocrat keeping the family villa going with… Read more →

• Star Trek Beyond (Star Trek: Más allá)

  Read as the film that opened the franchise's fiftieth-anniversary celebrations, Star Trek Beyond takes on extra meaning. Being the… Read more →

• Stromberg

  An insurance company's office turns out to be a surprisingly rich stage for portraying white-collar working life in 2000s Germany. Centring… Read more →

• The Gendarme and the Gendarmettes (Le Gendarme et les Gendarmettes)

  The film's starting point rests on a real social change: the first women entering the gendarmerie. In that sense the comedy works as a… Read more →

• Gendarme in New York (Le Gendarme à New York)

  The film works as a playful reflection of 1960s Europe's fascination with America: the Saint-Tropez gendarmes travel to New York for an… Read more →

• The First Beautiful Thing (La prima cosa bella)

  Opening the story at a beauty pageant in Livorno in the summer of 1971 is a telling choice: a woman being crowned "most beautiful mother"… Read more →

• The Flower of Evil (La Fleur du mal)

  The film's reckoning with the past touches a sensitive subject in France: the war years. Aunt Line's trial and acquittal for killing her… Read more →

• The Gunman

  The film's background touches a more serious subject than the average action film: the interests of multinational mining companies in the… Read more →

• The Judge and the Assassin (Le Juge et l'Assassin)

  The film is based on a real case, that of Joseph Vacher, remembered for numerous brutal crimes in late nineteenth-century France, but what… Read more →

• The Killer Likes Candy (Un killer per sua maestà)

  The film opens an interesting window onto how the European film industry worked in the late 1960s. Co-produced by Italy, France and West… Read more →

• The Little Bather (Le Petit Baigneur)

  The conflict at the heart of the film carries a sharp observation about employers and employees. Fourchaume runs a shipyard that bears his… Read more →

• The Promise (Das Versprechen)

  Starting in 1961, the film reads the rift between East and West Germany through two people's years spent apart. Its value lies in inviting… Read more →

• The Shortest Day (Il giorno più corto)

  The film's real story lies behind the screen: dozens of well-known performers from Italian, European and even American cinema took roles… Read more →

• The Wise Guys (Les Grandes Gueules)

  At the heart of the film is a man's effort to bring his family's long-idle sawmill back into production, a story about keeping an… Read more →

• The Woman in Gold

  The film turns one of post-war Europe's still-unsettled accounts, the return of art looted under the Nazis, into a personal story. Maria… Read more →

• Tripoli, Beautiful Land of Love

  The film uses the 1911 war between Italy and the Ottoman Empire over Libya as its backdrop, telling events entirely from the Italian side… Read more →

• Tristana

  Set in late nineteenth-century Toledo, the film examines the dominance that a man, wealth and religion exert over a woman's life. Don… Read more →

• Turkish for Beginners (Türkisch für Anfänger)

  The distance between Turkish-origin families and German families in Germany is both the material and the source of humour here. Forcing the… Read more →

• Venuto al mondo

  Set against Sarajevo and the Bosnian war, the film looks at the mark war leaves on individual lives through a woman who returns years later… Read more →

• Hope (Umut)

  Umut condenses the pains of urbanisation into the story of a carriage driver. A car killing his horse works almost as a symbol of an era… Read more →

• Woman Times Seven

  The film opens an interesting window on the shifting gender roles of the late 1960s: across seven segments women are presented as a… Read more →

• Young Sinners (Les Tricheurs)

  The film follows fairly well-off young Parisians at the end of the 1950s as they drift between the Left Bank around Saint-Germain-des-Prés… Read more →

• A Very Private Affair (Vie privée)

  Made when celebrity culture and press photography were growing fast, the film stands out for naming the price of fame so early. An immoral… Read more →

• Oh, Beautiful Istanbul! (Ah Güzel İstanbul)

  The film depicts a world in early-1980s Turkey where even getting married could become an economic luxury. Kamil, a long-distance driver… Read more →

• Behold a Pale Horse

  The film is about scores still unsettled twenty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. An anti-Franco fighter living in exile in… Read more →

• The Back Side of Beyoğlu (Beyoğlu'nun Arka Yakası)

  The film builds Beyoğlu as a district split between day and night, and makes that very line its subject. When a civil servant, the very… Read more →

• We Cannot Come Together (Bir Araya Gelemeyiz)

  The film builds the distance between the provinces and the big city through two trades: Orhan is a craftsman carrying on his father's… Read more →

• Goodbye Again (Aimez-vous Brahms…)

  Putting a relationship between a mature woman and a young man at the centre in 1961 was a notable choice given the morals of the time.… Read more →

• Alexander (Alexandre)

  Drawing partly on Robin Lane Fox's book on Alexander, the film tries to show an ancient king less as a conqueror than as a man caught up in… Read more →

• I Would Give My Life for You (Canım Sana Feda)

  The film shows plainly how women's work, education and honour were bound together in 1960s Istanbul. Türkan earns her living in a nightclub… Read more →

• My Cevriye (Cevriyem)

  Cevriyem centres on a figure Yeşilçam loved, the woman living on society's margins: the story opens with Cevriye fleeing the police after a… Read more →

• Crazy Friends

  It may be a children's animation, but the dilemma at its centre is a familiar adult one: Elliot choosing his family over his best friend… Read more →

• Destruction Force (La banda del trucido)

  This film's history offers a small clue to how 1970s Italian genre cinema was regarded. It was shot quickly so an actor could work off an… Read more →

• Domina

  Roman history is usually told as the story of generals and senators; Domina tries to read the same era through the eyes of Livia Drusilla… Read more →

• The World Is Not Enough

  For Turkish viewers, the interesting thing is that Istanbul plays both itself and somewhere else: the building presented as Baku is really… Read more →

• Female Agents (Les Femmes de l'ombre)

  Women who served in the secret war of the Second World War have long sat at the margins of war cinema. That makes it meaningful that the… Read more →

• Frantic

  Frantic is about the loneliness of a man whom institutions turn their backs on in a foreign city. The indifference of both the police and… Read more →

• French Cancan

  The film is regarded as Renoir's return to France after an exile that began in 1940, and in that light it hardly looks accidental that a… Read more →

• Furia à Bahia pour OSS 117

  The film is a good example for understanding why spy stories were so popular in sixties Europe. A French-Italian co-production reaching out… Read more →

• The Night, Angel and Our Children (Gece, Melek ve Bizim Çocuklar)

  The film treats trans people, sex workers and gay men in Istanbul's back streets not as a moral issue but as a question of making a living… Read more →

• Genius

  Who the series counts as a "genius" is telling in itself. Opening with two Europeans who changed science and painting, the selection turns… Read more →

• Gente di Roma

  The lead here is not a person but the city itself: a single day from the early hours to late at night shows Rome through its ordinary… Read more →

• When Will the Sun Rise? (Güneş Ne Zaman Doğacak)

  This film is remembered less for its own story than for what happened while it was showing: the explosive thrown into the Çiçek Cinema in… Read more →

• Welcome

  Migrants waiting in Calais to cross to Britain usually appear in the news as numbers; the film gives that crowd a single face. Having… Read more →

• Hôtel du Nord

  The film looks at the margins of 1930s Paris: young people without steady work, a woman who makes her living on the street, a petty crook… Read more →

• Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti)

  The film is set in a poor quarter of postwar Rome, and that backdrop matters as much as the comedy itself. The small-time crooks' dream of… Read more →

• In the Land of Blood and Honey

  The Bosnian War, the siege of Sarajevo and ethnic cleansing are among the heaviest pages of recent history, and telling that material… Read more →

• Cow Shaban (İnek Şaban)

  The film fuses two great dreams of late-1970s Turkey in one man: going to Germany to earn money, and rising overnight through football.… Read more →

• British Kemal vs. Lawrence (İngiliz Kemal Lawrense Karşı)

  The film builds 1919 Istanbul, an occupied capital, as an intelligence stage where the great powers also clash with one another. Grounding… Read more →

• Equilibrium

  The film asks the core question of twentieth-century dystopias once more: what will people give up in the name of security? Making emotion… Read more →

• Karaoğlan

  The film is set in 1238 and deals with the Turkic states' search for unity against the Mongol threat, and it is striking that the first… Read more →

• Kokowääh

  The title alone is a small lesson in culture: Kokowääh is the French dish coq au vin spelled the way it sounds to a German ear. A French… Read more →

• Empire of the Wolves (L'Empire des loups)

  For Turkish viewers, the most sensitive aspect is how the film frames the Turkish community in Paris. The killing of women of Turkish… Read more →

• Le Corps de mon ennemi

  The most interesting thing about the film is its setting: a town near Lille wholly bound to the textile industry, with an old-established… Read more →

• Le Roi danse

  The film presents Louis XIV as something like a figure of the early Enlightenment, and Lully as his natural ally in conflicts with the… Read more →

• Le Rouge et le Noir

  Stendhal's story is about how narrow the doors to social advancement were in 19th-century France, and the film keeps that conflict at its… Read more →

• Lindenstraße

  Lindenstraße's real value lies in its ambition to fit a whole society's agenda into one street for thirty-five years. Tackling… Read more →

• Mannaja

  Mannaja can also be read as a document from the last days of a genre. The assessments that place it, with Keoma, among the last important… Read more →

• Massacre in Rome

  In telling a real tragedy like the Ardeatine massacre, the film's most contentious choice is to include the claim that Pope Pius XII knew… Read more →

• Mıstık

  A villager left alone against the palace, the chief physician and the vizier: the set-up follows an old pattern of folk storytelling, the… Read more →

• Mr. Muhsin (Muhsin Bey)

  The film tells a story of class and migration through musical taste, in the Istanbul of its own day. The Beyoğlu world devoted to old… Read more →

• Isolated (Münferit)

  The title is a statement in itself. "An isolated incident" is one of the most familiar ways of splitting a social problem into separate… Read more →

• Nicholas on Holiday (Les Vacances du petit Nicolas)

  The film looks at the French middle-class summer holiday ritual, the weeks at a seaside hotel once school is out, through a child's eyes… Read more →

• Night Flight from Moscow (Le serpent)

  The film puts one of the Cold War's most talked-about figures at its centre, the Soviet intelligence man seeking refuge in the West, and… Read more →

• Niyazi Gul, the Galloping Vet (Niyazi Gül Dörtnala)

  Unlike big-city comedies, the film puts İzmir and the quiet life there at its centre, so it is easy to see why one critic read it as a… Read more →

• Only the Wind Knows the Answer (Die Antwort kennt nur der Wind)

  The film builds a moral tale out of wealth, insurance and blackmail on the Côte d'Azur of its day. The gulf between the billionaire… Read more →

• Operation Sabre (Sablja)

  The series takes on the 2003 assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić and the police operation that followed, so it is dealing with… Read more →

• Our Kind of Traitor

  The film's real subject is dirty money seeping across borders into respectable institutions. The link between the Russian mafia's… Read more →

• Phantom Pain (Phantomschmerz)

  The film sets the lifestyle of an urban, free-spirited man who avoids commitment against the fragility of life. Odd jobs, constant lack of… Read more →

• Quiet Chaos (Caos calmo)

  The film quietly pushes back against society's expectations of how grief ought to be lived. Pietro's vigil in the park looks like an… Read more →

• Romanzo Criminale

  While telling the story of young men from Rome's outskirts, the film asks its truly unsettling question in the background: how does a… Read more →

• La Grande Vadrouille

  Telling the story of Nazi-occupied Paris as a comedy was a bold choice only twenty years after the war. While treating the occupation in a… Read more →

• Shooting Stars (Trois Zéros)

  The film records, in the language of comedy, how football in the early 2000s was turning from a game into an industry. It is telling that… Read more →

• Royal Affairs in Versailles (Si Versailles m'était conté...)

  The film chooses to tell French history from inside the walls of a palace, and that sets its point of view from the outset. History flows… Read more →

• Sorry to Bother You

  The film's central idea, that success comes once you use a "white voice" on the phone, is a sharp observation about how race and class… Read more →

• The Battle of El Alamein

  The film's view of history is a good example of how much it matters who tells the story. As an Italian-French co-production, it approaches… Read more →

• The Confessions (Le confessioni)

  The film turns the feeling that the decisions running the global economy are taken behind closed doors into an actual place: a luxury hotel… Read more →

• The Equalizer

  The series was shot entirely in New York in the last years of the Cold War, and the timing matters. The never-named 'Agency' or 'Company'… Read more →

• The Facts of Murder (Un maledetto imbroglio)

  The film turns an ordinary murder investigation into a cross-section of Roman society, and that is where its strong strain of social… Read more →

• The President (Le Président)

  The film builds a fictional story on real arguments: monetary devaluation, and whether a European customs union would serve the country's… Read more →

• The Swindle (Rien ne va plus)

  The film's swindlers prey not on gullible people in the street but on delegates at business conventions, a small detail that makes plain… Read more →

• The Truth (La Vérité)

  Inspired by the Pauline Dubuisson case, the film is a notable record of how a young woman without steady work who lived on her own terms… Read more →

• The Two Gladiators (I due gladiatori)

  The film uses the real turmoil of AD 193, the Year of the Five Emperors, with the death of Commodus and the accession of Pertinax, as its… Read more →

• Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann)

  The film pictures Parisian high society as an entrance exam: Swann has been admitted thanks to his wit and fortune, yet that acceptance can… Read more →

• Under Ten Flags

  That an Italian-American production centred on the voyage of a German auxiliary cruiser was made only fifteen years after the war is itself… Read more →

• Story of Women (Une affaire de femmes)

  The film takes a hard look at how vulnerable a woman becomes in wartime when her husband is a prisoner and she is left alone with the… Read more →

• Vacanze di Natale

  Because it turns 1980s Italian holiday habits into comedy, the film can be read as a mirror of its own time. Where the earlier films looked… Read more →

• You Burned Me (Yaktın Beni)

  To my mind the most interesting thing here is how the film looks at kinship in a Turkish family. An uncle unseen for years who turns up and… Read more →

• Gravitational Loves (Yer Çekimli Aşklar)

  With segments that set fairy-tale names beside everyday life, the film offers an interesting cross-section of how love and relationships… Read more →

• 7 Dwarves – Men Alone in the Wood (7 Zwerge – Männer allein im Wald)

  Reaching almost seven million viewers and becoming the second most-watched film in German cinemas in 2004 shows that this comedy turned… Read more →

• Amateur Flirt (Acemi Çapkın)

  The presence of a shop, accessories and decoration in the film's world is a small but telling detail: Turkish comedies of the 1960s often… Read more →

• Agora

  Agora's greatest strength and its most debatable feature are the same thing: it stages a complex transformation that took centuries, the… Read more →

• Bamako

  Bamako's boldest move is taking the debate on the global economy out of conference halls and into a neighbourhood courtyard. Putting the… Read more →

• Banzo

  What makes Banzo valuable is that it treats colonialism not only as a system of exploited labour but as one that made people sick in… Read more →

• Belgica

  The film is built on the dream of a place where everyone can enjoy themselves freely, and it shows how fragile that dream is. For Jo the… Read more →

• White Nights (Le notti bianche)

  What makes the film interesting is that it treats loneliness as a social condition rather than a private misfortune. What isolates Mario is… Read more →

• A Woman's Enemy (Bir Kadın Düşmanı)

  The story centres on a man who makes all women pay for his own mistakes and his loss, and the title says so plainly. Returning to this… Read more →

• Brothers & Sisters

  Airing from 2006 to 2011, the series can be read as a mirror in which an American family is tested by the issues of its day. Bringing war… Read more →

• Four Steps in the Clouds (4 passi fra le nuvole)

  At a time when cinema in Fascist-era Italy was largely associated with escapist films, Blasetti and his writers showing the suburban petty… Read more →

• Loft

  Loft's mystery starts with a body, but what it really exposes is the double lives of five married men and how fragile their friendship is.… Read more →

• Chicken with Vinegar (Poulet au vinaigre)

  The pun in the title says something socially too: lifting street slang that calls the police 'chickens' into the title signals a wry… Read more →

• Cites

  Cites works like a mirror of a time when meeting online became ordinary. Its run from 2015 to 2024 covers the years when relationships… Read more →

• Da Vinci's Demons

  The series says openly that it tells a fictional version of Leonardo da Vinci's youth, and that honesty matters: history here is the ground… Read more →

• Death is serving (La muerte cumple condena)

  Being an Italian-Spanish co-production turns the film into a small but instructive document: the American Wild West myth, in the hands of… Read more →

• Dog Day (Canicule)

  The original French title, Canicule, means scorching heat, and it invites you to see the countryside as a stifling place. A fugitive from… Read more →

• The Ninth Surgical Ward (Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu)

  The film builds a contrast common in Turkish cinema out of Peyami Safa's world: on one side a young man living with his widowed mother in a… Read more →

• Don Camillo's Last Round (Don Camillo e l'onorevole Peppone)

  The strength of the Don Camillo series lies in fitting the biggest divide of post-war Italy, the tension between the Church and the… Read more →

• Elementary

  The show's most meaningful choice is treating addiction not as a character quirk but as an ongoing process of recovery. Assigning Holmes a… Read more →

• Everything Calls for Salvation (Tutto chiede salvezza)

  The show's most valuable move is turning a psychotic crisis into a question rather than a label. Daniele asking whether seven days make him… Read more →

• Fort Saganne

  Fort Saganne tells the colonial era from inside its point of view rather than critiquing it. A soldier of humble origins exploring the… Read more →

• French Connection II

  The film takes the drug trade out of being a New York problem and shows it as a network linking both sides of the Atlantic. The port of… Read more →

• Hearts and Armour (I paladini: storia d'armi e d'amori)

  That one of Renaissance Italy's most famous epic poems became an English-language fantasy film in 1983 is an interesting cultural story in… Read more →

• I See Naked (Vedo nudo)

  That a comedy making sex the main theme of every episode became a very big commercial hit in Italy in 1969 says something about the social… Read more →

• In Prison Awaiting Trial (Detenuto in attesa di giudizio)

  The phrase 'awaiting trial' in the title sums up the film's real subject: the time a person whose guilt has not been proven spends behind… Read more →

• Jappeloup

  The film turns the story of a rider and his horse in 1980s France into a narrative of national success, with the 1988 Seoul Olympics as its… Read more →

• Je suis timide mais je me soigne

  The title itself carries a clue about its time: presenting shyness not as a flaw or a personality trait but as a problem to be treated… Read more →

• The Bait (L'Appât)

  L'Appât is based on a real case from Paris in 1984 and deserves to be read less as a crime film than as a social-problem drama. Penniless… Read more →

• La Révolution française

  It is notable that a production made for the Revolution's bicentenary also covers the Terror and the execution of Robespierre. For a film… Read more →

• La Totale!

  The film treats a familiar anxiety about early-1990s middle-class marriage with humour: a husband who hides his job from his family and a… Read more →

• The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (Le premier jour du reste de ta vie)

  By spreading the life of a middle-class French family over twelve years, the film lets us read how the family as an institution changes… Read more →

• Le Radeau de la Méduse

  The wreck of the Méduse is a real event, and the film takes an interesting route to understanding how the disaster entered collective… Read more →

• The Witches (Le streghe)

  What the stories share is not a plot but a question: where does a woman stand in Italian society? The witch is an old image that carries… Read more →

• Loro

  Loro portrays the world of business and politics around Berlusconi between 2006 and 2009, and it does so as satire rather than documentary.… Read more →

• Lost Command (Les Centurions)

  Lost Command tells France's colonial wars through the eyes of the colonial power's own soldiers, and that point of view is what to keep in… Read more →

• Mademoiselle

  Through the figure of a seemingly respectable teacher in a small French village, the film questions how misleading the surface a community… Read more →

• Mary Magdalene

  The film retells the story of Mary Magdalene through a feminist reading that draws on both the Bible and apocryphal texts. That sets it… Read more →

• Blue Night (Mavi Gece)

  The film slips codes of gender and class into an entertaining template. On one side a successful woman doctor who feels incomplete because… Read more →

• May Fools (Milou en mai)

  Malle's smartest choice is to show May 1968 not from the street but from a family house in the provinces. While the strikes gripping the… Read more →

• Mister Scarface (l Padroni della città)

  The most interesting idea under the surface is a debt collector's dream of easy money. Tony lives by collecting other people's debts while… Read more →

• Othello

  The film's historical significance is clear: it was the first major-studio production to give the role of Othello to an African-American… Read more →

• Prepare a Coffin! (Preparati la bara!)

  The film's adventures abroad show the market logic on which sixties Italian genre cinema ran. Circulating in Germany under at least four… Read more →

• Fixed Hook 2 (Sabit Kanca 2)

  The film's comedy rests on a relationship many people in Turkey know well: the bond of debt and obligation between a tenant who cannot pay… Read more →

• Sabrina

  At its heart Sabrina is about the class distance between a chauffeur's daughter and the sons of a wealthy family; the gap between the… Read more →

• Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste)

  The film tells a quiet story about how fragile an artist's social rise can be. A man who was a celebrated concert pianist learns that his… Read more →

• Sivas

  Sivas is not really about dog fighting; it is about where and how a boy in Anatolia learns to be a man. In eleven-year-old Aslan's world… Read more →

• The Gendarme and the Extra-Terrestrials (Le Gendarme et les Extra-terrestres)

  The film sums up late-1970s French popular cinema well: a picture the critics savaged still drew over 6 million admissions in France and… Read more →

• The Tailor (Süslü Korkuluk)

  The show's most striking social layer is how a family member with a child-like mind becomes a secret and a source of shame. Peyami feeling… Read more →

• Repair Part (Tamirci Parçası)

  The film sets a long-established family losing its fortune against a young man who has built his own garage through hard work. That… Read more →

• Tara Road

  The film puts women from two different places in front of the same question: when a man's decision or a great loss turns their lives upside… Read more →

• Tatort

  Tatort's most interesting quality is that for more than half a century it has been recording the cities of three German-speaking countries.… Read more →

• Tele Girls (Tele Kızlar)

  Tele Kızlar takes on a real social wound, the trafficking of women and young women pushed into prostitution, in the popular film language… Read more →

• The Easy Way Out (L'Art de la fugue)

  The film examines the family through three brothers who could hardly be more different. The slowly failing family store where Gérard works… Read more →

• The Indian Tomb (Das indische Grabmal)

  A 1959 film about India, co-produced by West Germany, Italy and France, inevitably also reflects how Europe looked at the East. It is… Read more →

• The Last Judgement (Il giudizio universale)

  Bringing the end of the world down to everyday life in Naples is a classic route for social satire: faced with a great fear, people show… Read more →

• The Scientific Cardplayer (Lo scopone scientifico)

  The film tells of the gulf between poverty and wealth through the metaphor of a card game, and it does so not as a lesson but as the… Read more →

• The Third Generation (Die dritte Generation)

  The film was made in the thick of the far-left terrorism that preoccupied Europe in the late 1970s, and it reflects the director's… Read more →

• The Tiger of Eschnapur (Der Tiger von Eschnapur)

  A German architect coming to India to build schools and hospitals on a maharaja's commission frames the film's world through European eyes… Read more →

• The Truce (La tregua)

  The film focuses on a moment that Holocaust stories tend to treat less often: the day after liberation. The journey of survivors trying to… Read more →

• The White Princess

  Telling the Wars of the Roses and the Tudor court largely from the women's point of view is a welcome counterweight to the usual history of… Read more →

• Hope (Umut)

  The film's premise touches a wound often explored in Turkish cinema: a man who loses years abroad and, on his return, cannot recognise the… Read more →

• My Prostitute Love (Vesikalı Yarim)

  The film sets two worlds of the same city against each other: a young man who sells produce with his father in Kocamustafapaşa, and a woman… Read more →

• Violent Rome (Roma violenta)

  The film is an interesting period document of how crime and a sense of insecurity can turn into a political language. A commissioner thrown… Read more →

• The Double Life of Véronique (La Double Vie de Véronique)

  A story split between Poland and France, and Kieślowski's first film made partly outside his own country, it invites a reading as a product… Read more →

• War of the Buttons (La Guerre des boutons)

  Knowing that Louis Pergaud died at the front in 1915 gives this little war over button trophies a very different meaning. The rivalry… Read more →

• What to do in case of fire? (Was tun, wenn’s brennt?)

  The film's most interesting move is to read Berlin's transformation through the lives of a group of former anarchists. Where does the… Read more →

• Heart Wound (Yürek Yarası)

  The film asks a question village cinema often asked: how can a woman's name be stained by something beyond her control, and who pays for… Read more →

• 35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums)

  The film shows the Antillean community of the Paris suburbs not as a problem or a headline but as people who own their ordinary lives, and… Read more →

• A Bullet for the General (Quién sabe?)

  The film is about the Mexican Revolution, but in my view it also reflects how the idea of revolution was being argued over in 1960s… Read more →

• A View of Love (Un balcon sur la mer)

  The most interesting thing about the film is the historical rupture behind it: children of pied-noir background torn apart as Algeria won… Read more →

• Alphonse

  The series follows the search for identity of a man in his forties who is stuck in both work and marriage, and in my view its most… Read more →

• An Average Little Man (Un borghese piccolo piccolo)

  The original title, 'a petty, petty bourgeois', says plainly where the film is looking: the ordinary middle-class man of 1970s Italy… Read more →

• White Show (Beyaz Show)

  To see Beyaz Show as nothing more than entertainment would be to underrate television's social role in Turkey. Launched in the mid-1990s as… Read more →

• Black Sunday

  The film takes its inspiration, and its title, from the attack by the group Black September on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich… Read more →

• Bye Bye Germany (Es war einmal in Deutschland...)

  Holocaust survivors in post-war Frankfurt selling linens door to door so they can leave for America as fast as possible: the film puts a… Read more →

• Block C (C Blok)

  Even the housing block in the title is a sign of its time: for the urban middle class of the nineties, a tidy, sheltered and yet isolating… Read more →

• Callas Forever

  Callas Forever adds a fictional chapter to a real artist's life and positions itself closer to historical fantasy than biography. That… Read more →

• Can Tertip

  Military service is shared memory for many men in Turkey, which is why barracks comedies find an audience in every generation. Can Tertip… Read more →

• Paradise (Cennet)

  The film centres on mental health and on how a childhood loss can turn into a rupture lasting years, a subject I'd say is rare in Turkish… Read more →

• Chouchou

  The film puts at its centre an undocumented immigrant newly arrived in Paris from North Africa, a notable choice for a mainstream comedy.… Read more →

• Crimen

  Crimen's structure rests on everyone's alibis and secrets spilling out once a crime has to be explained. That set-up lends itself well to a… Read more →

• Dabbe (Dab6e) (Dabbe 6)

  What makes Dabbe 6 interesting is that it builds its fear not from imported figures but from religious belief and the jinn stories of… Read more →

• Reyhan (Dağlar Kızı Reyhan)

  The film brings together two big realities of late-1960s Turkey in one story: labour migration to Germany and the glittering but ruthless… Read more →

• Detective

  Setting the film in a large Paris hotel turns it into a small-scale model of society: a couple on the verge of splitting, people chasing… Read more →

• Don't Look Back (Ne te retourne pas)

  What makes the film interesting is that it places fear right in the middle of a woman's everyday life. Jeanne is married, a mother of two… Read more →

• Ela sti thesi mou

  The series' premise touches on the question of how much of a person's class is a matter of birth and how much of upbringing: two men from… Read more →

• My Favourite Fabric (Mon tissu préféré)

  The film tells the story of Syria sliding into civil war in 2011 not from the front line but from the life of a young woman hemmed in by… Read more →

• Eşrefpaşalılar

  The film looks at a rarely told side of internal migration: a community that moved from İzmir to Istanbul but brought its old habits along.… Read more →

• Sister Fatma (Fatma Bacı)

  Fatma Bacı looks at one of early-1970s Turkey's deepest social transformations, migration from countryside to city, through the window of a… Read more →

• Flavia the Heretic (Flavia, la monaca musulmana)

  The historical backdrop is intriguing: southern Italy amid events recalling the Otranto campaign, and a nun who refuses the role forced on… Read more →

• Whomever the Heart Loves (Gönül Kimi Severse)

  The conflict at the film's centre shows plainly the role assigned to marriage and to women in 1959 Turkey: it is the man who falls into a… Read more →

• Goodbye Berlin (Tschick)

  Goodbye Berlin puts two different kinds of exclusion in the same car: Maik, the left-alone son of a wealthy but broken family, and Tschick… Read more →

• Beautiful Driver

  A young woman driving a shared taxi in a 1970 film is a notable choice in terms of how the era saw women's work. Fatma's story shows how an… Read more →

• Happy-Go-Lucky

  The film asks whether optimism can be a form of resistance in a London where cynicism has become almost a city habit. Poppy being a primary… Read more →

• Headwinds (Des vents contraires)

  The film centres on a father left alone who has to carry childcare, money worries and his own guilt all at once, a family portrait that… Read more →

• Holy Lola

  Holy Lola is as much about the unequal structure of international adoption, reaching from a wealthy country into a poor one, as about a… Read more →

• House of David

  David is a figure shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, so the series has a chance to speak to audiences of all three traditions at… Read more →

• Incendies

  İçimdeki Yangın reads the legacy a civil war leaves in a family across two generations. Twins travelling to their mother's homeland to… Read more →

• India Song

  The film is set in 1930s Calcutta yet shows almost nothing of India; even its being shot at a château in France is, I think, part of that… Read more →

• Indochine

  The film tells the last years of colonial rule in French Indochina from inside the colonist's house, through the eyes of the owner of a… Read more →

• Innocents with Dirty Hands (Les Innocents aux mains sales)

  Behind the film lies a portrait of the wealthy European bourgeoisie of the 1970s. A rich man retired from business, a wife much younger… Read more →

• Inspector De Luca (Il commissario De Luca)

  The most interesting choice is to set a detective story in Italy's breaking-point years of 1938 to 1948. Through Fascism, the war and the… Read more →

• Rootless (Köksüz)

  The film offers a sharp look at how the empty place in a patriarchal household is filled after the father dies. The mother loading the… Read more →

• Turkish Passion (La pasión turca)

  For a Turkish viewer, the most intriguing thing about the film is how Istanbul looks through the eyes of a Spanish novel and film. Familiar… Read more →

• The Suspended Step of the Stork (To meteoro vima tou pelargou)

  The film captures a moment when the Cold War was ending yet new walls were rising in Europe, which makes it strikingly prescient for 1991.… Read more →

• Libera, My Love (Libera, amore mio...)

  What makes Libera interesting is that she is a woman who rejects Catholicism, fascism, communism and even liberal democracy, and lives her… Read more →

• Be Kind Rewind

  The film treats the old-fashioned neighbourhood video rental shop as a meeting place, and in doing so it records a culture that has all but… Read more →

• Malina

  What makes Malina interesting is its focus on female subjectivity rather than on any particular social period. A writer who is never named… Read more →

• Mistress (Metres)

  Metres is a good case study of how Yeşilçam in the early 1980s fed on foreign films. Safa Önal's script is based on the 1960 American film… Read more →

• Nasreddin Hodja and Timur (Nasreddin Hoca ve Timurlenk)

  The film builds Nasreddin Hodja less as the hero of a joke than as the conscience of ordinary people. The judge he faces stands for an… Read more →

• You Can't Win 'Em All

  A foreign production that tells the last days of the Greco-Turkish War through the eyes of two American mercenaries who arrive in Anatolia… Read more →

• Police Python 357

  The film is a good example of a story that travels across continents and decades: an American novel written in 1946, filmed once in 1948… Read more →

• Press

  Press approaches the dark years of the 1990s through unsolved murders and the pressure on the press. Set in 1992 in the Diyarbakır office… Read more →

• Roseanna's Grave

  What is most interesting here is how, in a small Italian town, even a place in the cemetery becomes a scarce resource. The townspeople's… Read more →

• Sanctuary (Freistatt)

  Sanctuary makes the degrading and violent methods of church-run children's homes in the late 1960s visible through a single boy's story.… Read more →

• Sarfarosh

  The film takes on the cross-border terrorism India faced in the 1990s head-on, and it does so from an openly national point of view.… Read more →

• Time to Love (Sevmek Zamanı)

  The class gap in the background works quietly beneath the love theme: Halil, a house painter working with his master, and Meral, whose… Read more →

• Taare Zameen Par

  The film's real contribution is questioning an education culture in which children who fail at school are often labelled lazy or… Read more →

• Tintin and the Golden Fleece (Tintin et le Mystère de la Toison d'or)

  Shot in Istanbul in 1961, this French-Belgian production now also has some value as a small document of how the city looked in those years.… Read more →

• The Boss of It All (Direktøren for det hele)

  The film puts a sharp question to power relations at work: a boss who pins unpopular decisions on an imaginary manager shows how… Read more →

• The Conspirators (Nell'anno del Signore)

  Drawing on the true story of two Carbonari executed in the Papal States, the film looks at Italian unification, the Risorgimento, from a… Read more →

• The Diary of Anne Frank (Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank)

  What sets this 2016 German adaptation of the world-famous diary apart is that it moves the broad historical picture into the background and… Read more →

• The Pizza Triangle (Dramma della gelosia (tutti i particolari in cronaca))

  The original title, Drama of Jealousy: All the Details in the News, is in my view a social observation in itself: private heartbreak turned… Read more →

• The Priest's Wife (La moglie del prete)

  The film came out in the very year Italy legalised divorce, and that timing gives its satire extra meaning. Its target, the celibacy the… Read more →

• The Spy

  The Spy tells an espionage story set in early-1960s Damascus, drawn from the real life of Eli Cohen, regarded as a national hero in Israel.… Read more →

• The Stranger's Hand

  A 1954 film pitting Yugoslav agents against Britain's MI5 in Venice directly reflects the tension of early Cold War Europe. At a time when… Read more →

• The Unvanquished (L'Insoumis)

  L'Insoumis puts the last and darkest phase of the Algerian War, the violence of the OAS, at its centre. It was inspired by the real case of… Read more →

• The Way Back

  By putting prisoners of many nationalities on the same road, the film uses a group portrait to show how the Soviet labour camps uprooted… Read more →

• To Nisi

  In my view the show's greatest value is that it turns Spinalonga from a backdrop for romantic drama into a social question: how does a… Read more →

• Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben)

  What makes the film most interesting is that it puts at its centre the social fabric of a small village where everybody knows everything… Read more →

• War of the Robots (La guerra dei robot)

  The film's real interest lies in showing how popular culture travelled in the late 1970s. The success of Star Wars in 1977 quickly spawned… Read more →

• Ya Ya Ya Sha Sha Sha (Ya Ya Ya Şa Şa Şa)

  The film reads a world in which football is seen as both a ladder up and a door to money through the class map of a single apartment… Read more →

• Flying Home

  The film sets the plain life of the Flemish countryside against the wealthy world of a sheikh from Dubai, testing the assumption that… Read more →

• 2019, After the Fall of New York (2019 - Dopo la caduta di New York)

  The film's post-apocalyptic world directly reflects the fear of nuclear war in the early eighties. The idea that radiation has left… Read more →

• 3 Idiots

  The film's real strength is that its satire is aimed not at some random school but at a country's engineering colleges and the middle-class… Read more →

• Absurd

  Absurd is more interesting as a document of its time than as a film. Its place among the 39 "video nasties" successfully prosecuted in… Read more →

• Child of Sorrows (Acıların Çocuğu)

  The film tells the story of 1980s poverty in the language of arabesk. Gambling debts, suicide, a widow left desperate by the struggle to… Read more →

• Her Name Is Vasfiye (Adı Vasfiye)

  The film builds the life of a provincial woman drifting from man to man in the towns of the Aegean coast out of the mouths of the men who… Read more →

• Purgatory (Araf)

  What makes Araf interesting is that it carries abortion, a subject rarely discussed out loud in Turkey, into the horror genre. The film is… Read more →

• Goddess of Love (Aşk Mabudesi)

  The film openly carries the class fantasies of late-sixties Turkish melodrama. The path of a poor young woman who has lost both parents… Read more →

• The Shirt of Flame (Ateşten Gömlek)

  The film brings a War of Independence novel published in 1922 to the screen only a year later, so it records an era's effort to tell its… Read more →

• Attack of the Robots (Cartas boca arriba)

  The film is a good example of the spy craze that swept Europe in the mid-sixties and of how Spanish-French co-productions worked: the… Read more →

• Dumb Cousins (Avanak Kuzenler)

  The most interesting thing here is who the characters measure themselves against. Tankut's wish to be both yesterday's Tarık Akan and… Read more →

• Babek (Babək)

  In telling the story of Babak Khorramdin, who rose against the Abbasid Caliphate, the film also reflects how Soviet-era Azerbaijan looked… Read more →

• Ballermann 6

  Ballermann 6 is a good example of a film that did not just reflect a holiday culture but helped shape it. Opening the story with two… Read more →

• Beau Travail

  The film studies the French Foreign Legion's training camp in the Djibouti desert as a closed male world. Hierarchy, discipline and the… Read more →

• Black Lightning (Chyornaya Molniya)

  The film's most interesting choice is planting an object from the Soviet past inside the American mould of the superhero genre. An old… Read more →

• Waiting for the Clouds (En attendant les nuages)

  The film approaches the expulsion of the Pontic Greeks not through grand historical narrative but through the identity an adopted, renamed… Read more →

• Camille

  The film brings to the screen the 2013-2014 civil war in the Central African Republic, a conflict that gets little room on the… Read more →

• Dante 01

  Beneath Dante 01's premise lies an uncomfortable question: what does volunteering mean in an experimental centre where dangerous criminals… Read more →

• Crazy Falcon (Deli Şahin)

  The types in Deli Şahin show how the popular cinema of the seventies saw the urban neighbourhood: tough guys, mobsters, a drunkard and the… Read more →

• Dil Dhadakne Do

  The film's real subject is the shop window of a wealthy family that looks flawless from outside. The ten-day anniversary cruise becomes a… Read more →

• Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin

  The story starts with a spoiled rich young woman running away from home to marry a film star, a small but telling observation about the… Read more →

• Ninety-Nine Mustafa (Doksan Dokuz Mustafa)

  The film is full of clues to the fifties middle-class family ideal: a father who runs a fabric shop, a mother at home and a pupil who does… Read more →

• Beyond the Hills (După dealuri)

  The film tells a real exorcism case without turning it into sensation, from a place that questions the conditions that produced it. The… Read more →

• Dying of the Light

  The most interesting thing about the film is that it places ageing and dementia inside the spy-thriller mould. The fact that Evan Lake gets… Read more →

• Ejareh-Nesheenha

  A run-down building on the edge of Tehran and the tenants trying to fix it: the setting of Ejareh-Nesheenha invites a reading as a metaphor… Read more →

• Rush to Interest Rates (Faize Hücum)

  Faize Hücum is a valuable social document because it brought the bankers' crisis of its own years to the screen while it was still raw.… Read more →

• Ghulam

  There is a long journey behind Ghulam: Malcolm Johnson's 1948 newspaper articles on dockside crime led to Kazan's 1954 film, then to Hindi… Read more →

• Gunfight at Red Sands (Duello nel Texas)

  What makes the film interesting is less its own story than the economic conditions it came out of. According to German sources, it was one… Read more →

• I Love You All (Je vous aime)

  The film paints an interesting portrait of women's independence in early-1980s France. Alice has a career, children and lovers; the story… Read more →

• Two Women (İki Kadın)

  Inspired by a real incident, the film looks at the point where power, the press and gender intersect. That a minister's assault becomes a… Read more →

• Rebel (İsyan)

  The film is at its strongest where it shows the agha system not just as one man's tyranny but as a web of economic dependence. Seven… Read more →

• The Confession (İtiraf)

  Harun, at the centre of the film, is a successful engineer: a middle-class man whom society considers to have 'everything in order'. His… Read more →

• Julietta

  The film's starting point carried real tension for the early 1950s: a young woman who turns down the older, society-minded gentleman her… Read more →

• The Small Town (Kasaba)

  The film shows a gloomy small town in western Turkey in the 1970s through children's eyes, and that choice says a lot historically. The… Read more →

• The Mule Drivers (Katırcılar)

  The film looks at a world where making a living, smuggling and the relationship with the state are tangled together in the border regions.… Read more →

• Kokkinos Kyklos

  Bringing real murder cases that once gripped the public to the screen is an interesting choice that shows how a society settles accounts… Read more →

• Little Lady in Europe (Küçük Hanım Avrupa'da)

  The film can be read as a small document of how Europe was imagined in early-sixties Turkey. The route through Greece, Italy and France… Read more →

• Love on the Run (L'amour en fuite)

  Made at the end of the 1970s, the film presents divorce, a broken-up family and wavering relationships not as tragedy but as an ordinary… Read more →

• Living & Dying

  The film is interesting less for its cinematic merit than as a glimpse of the Turkish film business's mid-2000s eagerness to take part in… Read more →

• Lola und Bilidikid

  Lola + Bilidikid holds a bold place among films about the Turkish community in Germany. Murat being an "Almancı" in Istanbul and a "migrant… Read more →

• Luck By Chance

  Through a young man who comes to Mumbai dreaming of stardom, the film examines how the economy of fame actually works. Luck, not talent, is… Read more →

• Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille tu n'iras pas danser)

  Léna's story centres on a woman struggling to stay afloat with her two children after leaving her husband, tested by her family's loving… Read more →

• Manon 70

  What makes Manon 70 interesting is how it tests what changes and what stays the same when an eighteenth-century love story moves to the… Read more →

• Massacre Time (Le colt cantarono la morte e fu... tempo di massacro)

  The Spaghetti Western was a European reworking of the American frontier myth in the hands of Italian producers, so watching these films… Read more →

• Until I Lose My Breath (Nefesim Kesilene Kadar)

  This is one of the few films to look closely at Istanbul's workshop economy. Serap working as a middleman is a telling detail: neither boss… Read more →

• The Teachers' Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer)

  It is set in a school, but its real subject is how institutions handle suspicion. The film shows how a principle that sounds firm and fair… Read more →

• On My Way (Elle s'en va)

  The film is about a woman in her sixties turning a new page, and it makes room for a kind of representation rarely seen on screen for women… Read more →

• Once Upon a Time, Cinema

  What's clever about the film is that it tells cinema's arrival in a country through the court and through power. A Shah who falls in love… Read more →

• Free Zone

  By putting a Tel Aviv taxi driver, a Palestinian woman and a young American on the same journey, the film tries to read the Middle East's… Read more →

• Silver Saddle (Sella d'argento)

  What makes Silver Saddle interesting is that it is one of the films closing a particular chapter of an industry. The road from A Pistol for… Read more →

• Our Crime Is Being Human (Suçumuz İnsan Olmak)

  Starting from a novel, the film traces a triangle of civil-service life, marriage and social pressure. That the bond between a married… Read more →

• Tehran Taboo (Teheran Tabu)

  The film's real subject is less the prohibitions themselves than the double standards they breed. The rules look equally strict for… Read more →

• The Celestine Prophecy

  The phenomenon behind the film is more interesting than the film itself. A 1993 novel that sold more than 23 million copies shows how wide… Read more →

• The Dust of Time

  The circumstances around the film say as much as its own story. Shot in English as a Greek, Italian and French co-production, with a cast… Read more →

• The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea

  The film's setting is no accident: Mesolongi, a poor, small town in Western Greece. The two women, one a police officer representing the… Read more →

• The Psychic (Sette note in nero)

  In The Psychic the investigation is led not by a policeman or a lawyer but by a woman trying to clear her husband, working with a… Read more →

• The Time That Remains

  The film approaches 1948, the year Palestinians call the Nakba and the year the state of Israel was founded, through the eyes of one family… Read more →

• Tidal Wave

  What is most striking about Japan Sinks is that it frames the disaster less as a natural event than as a society facing its own… Read more →

• Hope and Glory

  The Second World War is usually told from the front line; this film stays inside a house in a London suburb. How daily life carries on… Read more →

• A Long, Narrow Road (Uzun İnce Bir Yol)

  The film starts with a man arriving in Turkey from abroad with his wife and child. Coming home from abroad is known in Turkish society as… Read more →

• Vengo

  Vengo looks at how family ties, honour and blood feud intertwine in Andalusian gypsy communities. Caco's refusal to betray his brother lays… Read more →

• Vincent Wants to Sea (Vincent will Meer)

  The story of three young people living with Tourette syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia opens up mental health and… Read more →

• Yoko

  Two important themes lie beneath Yoko. The first is grief: a girl who lost her father at nine reconnecting with life through a secret of… Read more →

• 8 Women (Huit Femmes)

  Set in a 1950s manor, the film looks at a family's shop window and shows the cracks behind it. Once the head of the household is found… Read more →

• A Talking Picture (Um Filme Falado)

  The interweaving of French, Italian and English takes the film beyond the borders of any single national cinema, and its… Read more →

• Pain Cannot Be Shared (Acılar Paylaşılmaz)

  In the Turkey of 1989, bringing homosexuality to the screen as a family matter was a rare step, which is why the film is remembered as one… Read more →

• The American (Amerikalı)

  Amerikalı's most interesting idea is a man coming back after twenty years to find Türkiye turned into a kind of Little America. Through… Read more →

• Anchor and Hope (Tierra firme)

  Anchor and Hope asks how a family might be built outside blood ties and marriage, not through a thesis but through an everyday… Read more →

• As If I Am Not There

  The film deals with wartime rape against women during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. The detention sites at Foča that inspired the novel were… Read more →

• Ator l'invincibile

  Ator shows how profitable the barbarian hero had become in eighties popular culture. After the success of Conan the Barbarian, Italian… Read more →

• Road to the Moon (Aydede)

  Socially, the most notable thing about Aydede is that it puts an inheritance dispute in a small town at its centre. A widowed woman who… Read more →

• Bebo's Girl (La ragazza di Bube)

  Even the title ties Mara to a man: Bube's girl. Yet the story follows not Bube but a turbulent stretch of Mara's life, and that tension is… Read more →

• Belene

  What makes Belene interesting today is that it brought the repression of Bulgaria's Turkish minority between 1984 and 1989 to the screen… Read more →

• A Little Cloud (Bir Küçük Bulut)

  Bir Küçük Bulut puts the most concrete problem of the migration wave of its day, housing, at its centre. Saycan, who brings his family from… Read more →

• Castle of Blood (Danza macabra)

  Castle of Blood can also be read as a small document of how the 1960s Italian film industry worked. A director with a clashing schedule… Read more →

• Eden and After (L'Eden et après)

  The film can also be read as an odd period document about Europe's university youth of the time. Bored students gathering in a café to… Read more →

• Dangal

  In showing girls stepping onto the wrestling mat in a place like Haryana, where women are assigned set roles, the film leaves the key… Read more →

• Django and Sartana Are Coming... It's the End (Arrivano Django e Sartana... è la fine)

  The film's journey says as much about its time as the film itself. Attaching popular character names to new productions with no tie to the… Read more →

• Everything Went Fine (Tout s'est bien passé)

  The film takes up assisted dying, still legally and morally contested in many countries, not as an abstract debate but through a concrete… Read more →

• Fanaa

  Fanaa places the Kashmir question inside a big-budget Bollywood romance, a bold but risky choice. The relationship between a young Kashmiri… Read more →

• Far from the Madding Crowd

  The film treats the Victorian countryside not as a romantic postcard but as an order in which class and gender roles are tightly drawn.… Read more →

• Flight from Ashiya

  Made as an American-Japanese co-production roughly two decades after the war ended, the film is an interesting period document in its own… Read more →

• La Notte

  La Notte looks at the cultured, wealthy circles of early-1960s Milan: a celebrated novelist, a book launch, an industrialist's party that… Read more →

• Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (Ammazzali tutti e torna solo)

  The American Civil War is present here as scenery, not as a historical question. A Confederate captain who plans from the outset to… Read more →

• Gold

  Gold tells the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush not as an American legend but as a story of German-born immigrants. That choice makes visible how… Read more →

• The Innocent (Günahsızlar)

  The most instructive thing about the film is the censorship story behind it. According to the director, the censorship board would not… Read more →

• Hababam Battalion (Hababam Taburu)

  Hababam Taburu is an interesting example of how 1970s Turkish comedy imagined the outside world. Most striking is the way Umumba, an… Read more →

• A Season in Hakkari (Hakkâri'de Bir Mevsim)

  Through a teacher exiled for political reasons, the film makes visible the deep gulf between centre and periphery in Turkey. In a border… Read more →

• Hundra

  What makes Hundra interesting is that it hands the lead of a male-dominated sword-and-sandal genre to a woman warrior. The idea of a tribe… Read more →

• Two Lines (İki Çizgi)

  What is most interesting about Two Lines is that it puts a couple in which the woman is the older partner at the centre of the… Read more →

• Ishq

  Ishq rests on an open class conflict: two wealthy businessmen who look down on the poor want to marry their children to each other and keep… Read more →

• Jamón Jamón

  The film lends itself well to reading post-Franco Spain's transition through a family drama in a small town. The relationship between the… Read more →

• Jerichow

  What makes Jerichow more than a love triangle is where its characters stand in society. A former soldier back from Afghanistan, jobless and… Read more →

• Immortal (Immortel, ad vitam)

  The film's picture of the future mirrors the anxieties of the early 2000s well. A New York where genetically modified people live alongside… Read more →

• Cold of Kalandar (Kalandar Soğuğu)

  Cold of Kalandar looks at the life of a family trying to get by on a few animals in a high mountain village on the Black Sea, and does so… Read more →

• The Captain (Kaptan)

  Beneath Kaptan's light-looking story lies a familiar eighties worry: debt. A ship seized over a promissory note paid late, a bailiff and a… Read more →

• The Karadede Affair (Karadedeler Olayı)

  What is most interesting about the film is its choice of the 1989 provinces as a setting for horror. Strange village stories in the… Read more →

• Those Who Awaken in the Dark (Karanlıkta Uyananlar)

  Karanlıkta Uyananlar is remembered as one of the few Turkish films to tackle unionisation, workers' rights and strikes head-on, which alone… Read more →

• La Cage aux Folles 3: The Wedding

  In the mid-eighties, sustaining a series centred on an older gay couple across three films was remarkable for mainstream European comedy.… Read more →

• Les Vengeances de Maître Poutifard

  The film reverses the teacher-pupil relationship from its usual direction: the one nursing a grievance is not the pupil but the teacher… Read more →

• Love Island (Otok ljubavi)

  Žbanić's cinema had mostly shown Bosnia in the shadow of war and its aftermath; Love Island instead presents a Bosnian family free of that… Read more →

• Mademoiselle Chambon

  What makes the film interesting is that it builds a love story on class difference. The distance between Jean, a construction worker, and… Read more →

• Miele

  What Miele draws attention to is how quietly and secretly decisions about the end of life can be carried out. Irene working under a code… Read more →

• My Best Part (Garçon chiffon)

  The film reads a man's crisis in his thirties from inside the mother's house in Limousin rather than from Paris. The choice is meaningful… Read more →

• Omar

  Omar's strength is that it shows the separation wall not as a slogan but as a reality woven into everyday life. A baker who has to cross a… Read more →

• One Day in Europe

  The film uses football as a shared language: the Galatasaray v Deportivo La Coruña final in Moscow is the pretext that binds strangers to… Read more →

• Wrestler (Pehlivan)

  Pehlivan touches on an important reality of early-eighties Turkey: men who could not make ends meet looking for hope in work abroad, in… Read more →

• People in Luck (Les Veinards)

  Winning the top prize in a lottery is a telling dream for early-1960s France: in years of post-war recovery and a rising consumer society… Read more →

• Perfect Strangers (Perfetti sconosciuti)

  The film tells the story of an age in which the smartphone has become less a means of communication than a box of secrets. Questioning how… Read more →

• Psst (Pişt)

  Pişt can be read as part of the mid-2010s trend of bringing social-media personalities to cinema; the leads' bond with their audience was… Read more →

• Rosewater

  What makes Rosewater worthwhile is that it shows, through a single life, how journalism became a hazard after Iran's 2009 election.… Read more →

• Bewildered (Şaşkın)

  Şaşkın offers a small slice of mid-2000s university life: sharing flats, internships and late-night radio shows. At a time when social… Read more →

• What Wouldn't a Lover Do? (Seven Ne Yapmaz)

  The story's conflict rests on a familiar contrast of 1970s Turkey: a wealthy shipowner on one side, a young musician trying to earn a… Read more →

• Shaft's Big Score

  That Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gave a blaxploitation sequel more than three times the first film's budget shows how valuable a Black private… Read more →

• Simple Passion (Passion simple)

  What makes the film interesting is that it builds its heroine not as someone fragile but as a divorced, self-reliant university lecturer.… Read more →

• Skin Deep (Aus meiner Haut)

  The film also asks where identity sits in the body through the lens of gender. Leyla feeling freer first in another woman's body and then… Read more →

• Talaash: The Answer Lies Within

  The film puts Mumbai's two faces side by side: the glittering world of Bollywood stars on one hand, the city's underworld on the other.… Read more →

• Ten Days' Wonder

  Ten Days' Wonder is an interesting case of exchange between popular crime fiction and European art cinema. Knowing that two American… Read more →

• The Secret Garden

  The story's move from India to a manor on the Yorkshire moors makes plain the ties between the England of the novel's day and its colonial… Read more →

• The Vourdalak (Le Vourdalak)

  Aleksey Tolstoy's 1839 novella stages an encounter between a refined outsider from the centre and the fears of the remote countryside.… Read more →

• Child of Taurus (Toros Çocuğu)

  The figure of the young man who studies in Europe and returns to serve his country is a familiar reflection of the early Republican… Read more →

• Tough Enough (Knallhart)

  The film measures the distance between two Berlin districts through one teenager's life: moving from a comfortable home in Zehlendorf to… Read more →

• Trepalium

  Trepalium's starting point lies in the etymology of its title: thinking about work through a word derived from an instrument of torture… Read more →

• Two Men in Manhattan (Deux Hommes dans Manhattan)

  The film's central question still feels current: when a sensational story clashes with conscience, what should a journalist choose? Making… Read more →

• Grapes of Hope (Umut Üzümleri)

  Being a Fakir Baykurt adaptation ties the film straight to the Turkish village-literature tradition: land, debt, the teacher and the… Read more →

• Volt

  By setting a police officer's killing of a refugee, and the impunity that follows, in the near future, the film touches one of the most… Read more →

• Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa? (Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l'amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa?)

  The film's most interesting story is about censorship: the French distributor trying to cut its anti-colonial ideas, Blier, who voiced the… Read more →

• Before the Rain

  As the first film made in newly independent Macedonia, Before the Rain is a witness to its own time. The crossing of paths between a young… Read more →

• Captain Tahsin (Yüzbaşı Tahsin)

  The film tells the War of Independence through a village rather than the front: villagers who blow up the enemy's ammunition column, the… Read more →

• Zip & Zap and the Marble Gang (Zipi y Zape y el club de la canica)

  Bringing two of Spain's long-standing comic characters to the screen, the film hides a familiar question behind its children's fun: the… Read more →

• 1 Man, 1 Woman, 2 Children (1 Erkek 1 Kadın 2 Çocuk)

  The series is like a mirror held up to the urban Turkish couple of the late 2000s and the 2010s: small arguments at home, visits to the… Read more →

• A King Without Distraction (Un roi sans divertissement)

  Setting the story in the winter of 1843, in a mountain village cut off from the world, gives good ground for thinking about how closed… Read more →

• Mixed with Bitterness (Acı İle Karışık)

  The film maps the sharp class divide of late-sixties Istanbul onto a meeting between a poor neighbourhood and a society district. Street… Read more →

• Across the sea (La Mer au loin)

  The film tells the story of an undocumented migrant in 1990s Marseille through his bond with a police officer who has the power to deport… Read more →

• God Is Generous (Allah Kerim)

  The film portrays the last years of Abdul Hamid II's reign through the way suspicion and surveillance hem in everyday life. That an… Read more →

• Amok

  Amok matters as a response to apartheid in Africa's own voice. That Morocco, Senegal and Guinea joined forces on it shows racism being… Read more →

• Hunting Time (Av Zamanı)

  The film looks at the fear and violence of the 1980 military coup through the eyes of an intellectual. The writer leaving the city for… Read more →

• My Father Is in the Military (Babam Askerde)

  Babam Askerde stands out among the September 12 films for its point of view: it shows the impact of the coup era not from inside politics… Read more →

• Voice of My Father (Babamın Sesi)

  Voice of My Father chooses to tell the Maraş Massacre not through the event itself but through the mark it left on a family's memory, and… Read more →

• Honey (Bal)

  Shooting in the Çamlıhemşin district of Rize, at the foot of the Kaçkar Mountains, ties the film tightly to its geography. A father who… Read more →

• Barbara

  Barbara questions the usual way of honouring a singer who holds a place in France's cultural memory. Societies tend to remember their… Read more →

• Bombay Talkies

  The common thread of Bombay Talkies is its characters' passion for classic Indian cinema. That choice is a reminder that in India film is… Read more →

• Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement)

  The film questions the apparent solidity of a long relationship and how fragile it can turn out to be. A relationship Sara ended years ago… Read more →

• Le Grand Voyage

  The film turns the generation gap between a young man of immigrant background raised in Europe and his devout father into a road story.… Read more →

• Changing Times (Les Temps qui changent)

  What is most interesting about the film is the mixed world its characters assemble. Cécile, who settled in Morocco long ago and made a home… Read more →

• Children of Sarajevo (Djeca – Kinder von Sarajevo)

  The film looks less at the war itself than at what comes after, and that, I think, is its real strength. The story of two siblings who lost… Read more →

• The Mad Woman (Çıldıran Kadın)

  The title of the source work, Bir Yuva Böyle Yıkıldı ("How a Home Was Destroyed"), gives away the story's moral frame from the start… Read more →

• Copilot (Die Welt wird eine andere sein)

  The film's most striking choice is to tell a story of radicalisation, usually seen through the perpetrator, from the viewpoint of the woman… Read more →

• Dhobi Ghat

  Even the title is a choice: it puts the washermen's ghat, the city's unseen labour, in the name. A solitary painter, a banker who is a keen… Read more →

• Dil Chahta Hai

  Dil Chahta Hai's box-office pattern says as much as its story: succeeding in the cities while staying weak in rural areas is a clear sign… Read more →

• DJ Ahmet

  What stands out most is that the film centres on a Turkish-speaking life outside Türkiye, in a Yörük village in rural North Macedonia. That… Read more →

• Eastern Plays (Iztochni piesi)

  The film approaches xenophobia from a place Turkish viewers will recognise: a Turkish family attacked in Sofia. Setting a neo-Nazi group's… Read more →

• Exils

  The film takes up the post-colonial relationship between France and Algeria through the origins of two young people, and does so with a… Read more →

• Fuse (Gori vatra)

  The film captures a condition familiar to many societies emerging from war: the gulf between the shop window shown to outsiders and the rot… Read more →

• Come Back (Geri Dön)

  Beneath the forbidden-love story lies a less discussed class story: Gamze, who comes from poverty, gains a comfortable life by marrying an… Read more →

• Hacı Murat Is Coming (Hacı Murat Geliyor)

  The film brings real historical figures, Shamil and Hadji Murad, to the screen as heroes of an adventure against the Russians. Yet false… Read more →

• Halima's Path

  The strength of Halima's Path lies in reducing the vast tragedy of the Bosnian war to a single mother's effort to recover her lost son's… Read more →

• Real Treasure (Harbi Define)

  The most interesting thing about the film is that it approaches the idea of treasure from two directions. On one side is a past in which… Read more →

• Fig Jam (İncir Reçeli)

  The film offers a small but striking observation about early-2010s Istanbul: relationships formed in the big city without knowing anything… Read more →

• The Trace (İz-Rêç)

  The social weight of İz-Rêç lies in fitting the different marks displacement leaves on three generations into a single train journey. An… Read more →

• White as Snow (Kar Beyaz)

  What the film really says is that the teahouse is a small map of a village economy: a child sells buttermilk, an old man sells winter… Read more →

• Mixed Kebab

  The film pushes the experience of young people of immigrant background raised in Belgium, caught between two worlds, to its sharpest point… Read more →

• Kickboxer

  The film is seen as the first to bring Muay Thai to audiences worldwide, and in that sense it acted as a channel of cultural transmission.… Read more →

• La víctima número 8

  The show's boldest choice is to approach a jihadist attack from the perpetrators' point of view as well as the victims'. That refuses an… Read more →

• Late Shift (Heldin)

  The title of the book that inspired the film sums up its point: the problem is not the profession but the conditions. Late Shift does not… Read more →

• The Demons (Les Démons)

  The witch trial points to a dark chapter of European history, a time when women were accused and condemned, and the revenge motif is set up… Read more →

• Love & Anarchy (Kärlek & anarki)

  What makes the series interesting is the way it turns a flirting game into a tool for questioning the rules of modern life. A… Read more →

• Mafioso

  The film fits the deep divide between Italy's north and south into one man's holiday trip. Nino, a Sicilian who has become a factory… Read more →

• Malkoçoğlu Raiders Are Coming! (Malkoçoğlu Akıncılar Geliyor)

  The film uses the diplomatic tension between Byzantium, Serbia and the Ottomans as a backdrop for adventure; even including among the… Read more →

• Marjan

  There is a telling parallel between what the film shows and how it came to be. On screen, a line is drawn between the settled village and… Read more →

• Corn Island

  The island's position on the border between Georgia and Abkhazia is the film's strongest social layer. For a grandfather and granddaughter… Read more →

• Seven Days... Seven Nights (Moderato cantabile)

  Beneath the story lies an open class tension: the wife of a wealthy industrialist and a worker meet in a café in a small port town. Anne's… Read more →

• The Ottoman Lieutenant

  Eastern Anatolia around 1915 is one of the heaviest and most historically contested settings of the First World War. A film set there will… Read more →

• Paris Memories (Revoir Paris)

  The film takes terrorism out of the headlines and looks at the lives left behind after an attack, which to me is its real value. Mia… Read more →

• Piso Porta

  The story is set in 1960s Greece and looks at a family shaken by the loss of the father within the family structure of the time. The… Read more →

• Plato's Academy

  The film builds an Athens neighbourhood changing through migration with almost laboratory simplicity: Chinese newcomers opening shops… Read more →

• Meant to Be (Prangalı Yarim)

  The most interesting detail in the story is that the young couple, once married, want to leave town for the Istanbul life they have admired… Read more →

• Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak

  The conflict at the film's heart is that old tension between individual love and family authority. In a setting where a bitter feud between… Read more →

• Rangeela

  Rangeela's love triangle can really be read as a class choice: caught between her childhood friend from the streets and the famous star who… Read more →

• Nightingale of the East (Şark Bülbülü)

  The film tells the great migration story of the 1970s through comedy, but the social order in the background is serious: the power of the… Read more →

• Tel Aviv on Fire

  What makes the film socially interesting is that it shows people living under the shadow of the West Bank occupation without casting them… Read more →

• The Dreamlife of Angels (La Vie rêvée des anges)

  The film looks at young women living precarious lives in late-1990s France. Isa, who carries everything she owns in a backpack and drifts… Read more →

• The Embalmer (L'imbalsamatore)

  Being inspired by a real incident reported in the Roman press in 1990 gives the story the chill of a news page. Instead of familiar Italian… Read more →

• The Man Who Lies (L'Homme qui ment)

  It is fruitful to read the film as part of the modernist current in 1960s European cinema that questioned storytelling itself. Being a… Read more →

• The Man Who Sold His Skin (L'Homme qui a vendu sa peau)

  Through the story of a young man fleeing the Syrian civil war, the film makes a deep global inequality visible: while some people cross… Read more →

• The Net 2.0

  Shooting most of the film in Istanbul makes it of extra interest to a Turkish audience. The city is cast as the place where a foreign… Read more →

• The Pod Generation

  The film carries one of today's most debated questions into the near future: what happens if parenthood becomes a service sold by a… Read more →

• The Woman Next Door (La Femme d'à côté)

  The film looks beneath the orderly surface of middle-class marriage in the French provinces of its day. In this small world, where two… Read more →

• Three Quarter Moon (Dreiviertelmond)

  Three Quarter Moon deals with the Turkish presence in Germany not through big social issues but through the forced companionship of a taxi… Read more →

• Turkish Passport (Türk Pasaportu)

  Türk Pasaportu presents, through testimony and documents, the account of Turkish diplomats saving Jews during the Second World War, with… Read more →

• Vampire Sisters (Die Vampirschwestern)

  A charming story about migration dressed up as a children's film. Two girls who move from Transylvania to a German town, have to learn to… Read more →

• Homeland and Namık Kemal (Vatan ve Namık Kemal)

  Set along the Danube and around Silistre during the Ottoman-Russian wars, the film also brings real literary figures such as Namık Kemal… Read more →

• Xenia

  The title is Greek for hospitality, and the story tests that idea from the other side: two brothers born to a mother of Albanian descent… Read more →

• My Babies (Yavrularım)

  The return home for good that sets the story going was a familiar experience in 1980s Türkiye: families who had spent years abroad came… Read more →

• The Passenger (Yolcu)

  The film places the war years not on great battlefields but at a railway station, and I think that is a meaningful choice: the line stands… Read more →

• Yor, the Hunter from the Future

  Yor is a small but telling example of how eighties European genre cinema worked: an Italian, French and Turkish co-production, adapted from… Read more →

• The Swimmers

  The film tells of fleeing the war in Syria not through statistics but through the story of two sisters, which takes the refugee question… Read more →

• Zephyr (Zefir)

  Zefir shows life in the Eastern Black Sea highlands without embellishment; shooting on the Çambaşı highland with local villagers in the… Read more →

• 3 Giant Men (3 Dev Adam)

  3 Dev Adam is one of the best-known examples of Turksploitation, the Yeşilçam trend of borrowing Hollywood characters without permission… Read more →

• Painful Memories (Acı Hatıralar)

  Being a Turkish-Iranian co-production shot in 1977 makes the film historically interesting: filmmakers from the two countries bring… Read more →

• Adam

  Adam shows how a young woman in Casablanca who is pregnant outside marriage is left alone under social pressure, seen through the eyes of a… Read more →

• Oh, This Youth!

  Ah Bu Gençlik is the product of a film partnership between Turkey and Iran in the mid-seventies, released under different titles in the two… Read more →

• Amal

  Although it is set in a Brussels high school, its real subject reaches beyond the school walls: a teacher's freedom in a European city… Read more →

• Anastasia

  A love triangle between a young woman and a father and his son may seem ordinary for a series today; but the fact that it was considered… Read more →

• Father of Fathers (Babaların Babası)

  What stands out in it as a period piece is that it puts at its centre a successful businesswoman who raised three children on her own. For… Read more →

• Big Man, Little Love (Büyük Adam Küçük Aşk)

  Known as the first film from Turkey to include Kurdish dialogue, Büyük Adam Küçük Aşk puts the question of language at the very centre of… Read more →

• Death in Sarajevo (Smrt u Sarajevu)

  The film marks the centenary of the assassination that triggered the First World War not only through a commemoration but through the… Read more →

• Crazy Yusuf (Deli Yusuf)

  Bringing the Köroğlu legend into the seventies city, the film touches one of the period's most pressing issues: shanty housing and title… Read more →

• A Dagger Fell into the Sea (Denize Hançer Düştü)

  The film looks at the world of theatre through the eyes of two actresses and treats it as a field of power. The love, lovelessness… Read more →

• Ice Cream, I Scream (Dondurmam Gaymak)

  The film is set in the 1990s in a small coastal town in Muğla, an apt choice for depicting the years when big national brands moved into… Read more →

• Peak (Doruk)

  The film's most interesting social detail is that its heroes make their living by selling maps to treasure hunters. This small-scale… Read more →

• From Lips to Weapon (Dudaktan Silaha)

  The film handles Yeşilçam's favourite drug-ring theme through the adventure template. Treating drugs not as a social problem but as the… Read more →

• Dreams

  Because the eight dreams span a lifetime from the 1910s to the 1980s, the film becomes not just a personal notebook but a witness looking… Read more →

• Bandit Halil (Eşkiya Halil (Haydut))

  A story in which an agha covets the villagers' land and justice can only be sought by a bandit in the hills reflects the land-and-power… Read more →

• Esztergom Castle (Estergon Kalesi)

  The film tells the story of Esztergom, one of the Ottoman frontier fortresses in Hungary, through the historical outlook of 1950s Turkey.… Read more →

• Farha

  Farha brings the 1948 Nakba, the year Palestinians were driven from their land, down to the scale of one village and one girl. Events like… Read more →

• Fatih's Loyal Follower: Kara Murat (Fatih'in Fedaisi: Kara Murat)

  The film tells of the Ottoman struggle with Byzantium and the fight for the throne at court through the eyes of a comic-strip hero, so it… Read more →

• Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer)

  Rather than depicting the region's unnamed war directly, the film looks at memory through laments and witnesses. Turkish, Kurdish and… Read more →

• Gallipoli (Gelibolu)

  Gallipoli's central ambition is to tell the war not as a national epic but as suffering shared in the trenches. The letters and diaries of… Read more →

• There's a Letter from Halime (Halime'den Mektup Var)

  The film builds a story in which the War of Independence generation hands its ideal of solidarity on to the next; comradeship in arms works… Read more →

• The Struggle for Life (Hayat Kavgası)

  The film catches the changing face of late-1960s Turkey in small details: a young man who loses his parents and drops out of high school… Read more →

• I Was Always Oppressed (Hep Ezildim)

  In the late eighties arabesque was strong not only in music but in cinema, and this film carries that sensibility into the home of a… Read more →

• How I Ended This Summer (Kak ya provyol etim letom)

  An experienced but reclusive meteorologist and a young student sharing one summer invites a reading about the distance between two… Read more →

• Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

  This film is a good case study in how a story travels between cultures. A tale born in Hollywood becomes a Hindi romantic comedy and is… Read more →

• Free Man (Hür Adam)

  A biography of an Islamic scholar whose life was marked by convictions, exile and imprisonment inevitably touches on the relationship… Read more →

• Between Two Bayonets (İki Süngü Arasında)

  The film's most striking feature is that it roots its story in the practice of besleme, girls taken in as servants and raised in wealthy… Read more →

• Fig Jam 2 (İncir Reçeli 2)

  The first Fig Jam's journey is an audience story in its own right: a film that opened in limited release, then spread by word of mouth and… Read more →

• İyilik

  A life that looks flawless from outside turning out to be an illusion is a familiar theme that questions the gap between an image of… Read more →

• Kara Murat, Master of the Seas (Kara Murat Denizler Hakimi)

  Although the film takes the reign of Mehmed II and the Ottoman navy's fight against pirates as its subject, it leans on an adventure… Read more →

• Kezban

  Kezban explores the distance between the provinces and Istanbul high society through a young girl's story. That Kezban is mocked for her… Read more →

• The Second Wife (Kuma)

  The most striking thing about Kuma is that it does not tell its migration story from the usual angle. The family in Vienna keeps tradition… Read more →

• The Law of the Wolf (Kurt Kanunu)

  Kurt Kanunu uses the assassination attempt planned against Mustafa Kemal Pasha in İzmir in 1926 as its backdrop and reads the early years… Read more →

• La criatura

  The film should be read together with when it was made: right after Franco's death, in years when Spain was searching for a direction. The… Read more →

• Melodrama

  By unpicking an artist couple's marriage through addiction, the film brings out the responsibility a family crisis places on the woman: it… Read more →

• A Matter of the Homeland (Memleket Meselesi)

  A single slap becoming a national affair is a clever device that weighs everyday injustice and personal dignity on the same scale. Adil… Read more →

• Min Dît: The Children of Diyarbakır

  Min Dît centres on the life of two children who lose their parents during the years of conflict, living on the streets of Diyarbakır, and… Read more →

• Muro: Damn the Humanist Inside (Muro: Nalet Olsun İçimdeki İnsan Sevgisine)

  The film turns a familiar figure from Turkey's recent political history, the leftist who leaves prison intent on starting the revolution… Read more →

• Of Money and Blood (D'argent et de sang)

  The series shows how a market set up to fight global warming turned into a vast playground for fraud, and that sets it apart from an… Read more →

• Oflu Hoca’nın Şifresi 2

  The film's comedy is built on the local politics and family ties of a small place: a mayor who has lost his seat immediately agrees to Nur… Read more →

• Parthenope

  Following a woman born in 1950, the film carries in its background a long transformation that begins in post-war Italy. What is most… Read more →

• Raja Hindustani

  That Raja Hindustani was the year's top earner shows how strong the appetite was in 1990s India for love stories that cross class lines.… Read more →

• Selam: Bahara Yolculuk

  Drawing on a true life story, the film follows a teaching couple trying to open a school in Kyrgyzstan, and it is also a story of cultural… Read more →

• Should the Wind Drop (Si le vent tombe)

  The airport at the heart of the film is not just a building for the unrecognized Artsakh Republic but a symbol of its door to the world.… Read more →

• Snow (Snijeg)

  Snow is about a moment when the war is over but the mourning is not. Set in 1997, it shows how people whose loved ones' bodies were never… Read more →

• My Sweet Pepper Land (Tatlı Biber Diyarım)

  The film reads the days of Saddam Hussein's fall from a remote village where the borders of Iran, Turkey and Iraq meet, asking how a great… Read more →

• The Blue Caftan (Le Bleu du caftan)

  The film tells of a hidden identity from inside a marriage and never turns it into a loud message picture. Its setting in the medina of… Read more →

• The Imam

  Through a computer engineer who hides his Imam-Hatip background and has built a Western lifestyle, The İmam moves the divide between… Read more →

• The Inner Life of Martin Frost

  This film offers little to anyone looking for a social backdrop, and it does so on purpose. A co-production of the United States, France… Read more →

• Lying Emine (Yatık Emine)

  As its title suggests, Memleket Hikâyeleri is a book that looks at the provinces, and Yatık Emine reads that provincial world through one… Read more →

• We're Dining (Yemekteyiz)

  What makes Yemekteyiz interesting is less the food than the homes it opens up. Five strangers taking turns as guests in each other's… Read more →