Büşra

Alper Çağlar directed the Turkish drama Büşra, co-writing it with Bahadır Boysal, and it reached cinemas on March 19, 2010. Its source is Boysal's comic heroine of the same name, who appeared weekly in the humor magazine Leman. Running about 105 minutes, it is dated 2009 for production in some places and 2010 for release.

As in the printed strips, the story follows a heroine who turns up everywhere, from a headscarf fashion show to a masked ball. The contradictions peculiar to Turkish society keep landing her, and the people around her, in trouble. The film is built from four lonely people, four different outlooks and four painful stories that intertwine, and the inevitable tragedy shows that in societies without tolerance people are condemned to loneliness. The cast includes Tayanç Ayaydın, Çiğdem Batur, Kaan Urgancıoğlu, Enise Ütük, Murat Prosçiler and Mine Kılıç.

Turkish cinema had already adapted comic heroes such as Tarkan and Kara Murat, and strip characters such as Hüdaverdi, but Büşra stands apart as a politically tinged humor-magazine creation. One critic counted it among the interesting examples of a local cinema short on variety, and found the character hard to explain to newer viewers. In a society split into camps, the film pleased neither conservatives nor others and drew a heavy volley of criticism.