September Storm (Eylül Fırtınası) (translated)

Eylül Fırtınası (September Storm) is a 1999 Turkish political drama directed by Atıf Yılmaz. Gaye Boralıoğlu wrote the screenplay from a work by Habib Bektaş, and İskender Ulus produced the film for Ulus Filmcilik and Delta Film. Shot in colour by cinematographer Erdal Kahraman and scored by Tamer Çıray, the 120-minute feature reached Turkish cinemas on 11 February 2000.

The story opens in the first days of the military coup of 12 September 1980. Five-year-old Metin's mother, Ayten, is imprisoned, while his father's photograph appears on the wanted notices posted all over the island. The boy is sent to his grandfather Hüseyin Efe on Bozcaada, but once people start calling his mother a communist, the other children begin shutting him out.

The political violence of the period therefore reaches the viewer not through the street but through ordinary domestic life, filtered by what a small child can and cannot make sense of; a national rupture becomes a family story told on the scale of one small island.

Tarık Akan plays the grandfather Hüseyin Efe, Zara plays Ayten and Kutay Özcan the young Metin, with Nejat İşler as the grown-up Metin, Deniz Türkali as Şerife Teyze and Mesut Akusta as Kahraman.