The Karadede Affair (Karadedeler Olayı) (translated)

The Turkish horror-thriller Karadedeler Olayı came out on September 16, 2011. Erkan Bağbakan directed it from a screenplay by Erdoğan Bağbakan, and the 78-minute film uses the found-footage format, as if assembled from raw recordings recovered later. That vein runs from Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust through The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and [Rec], and it is one of Turkey's takes on the trend.

It presents itself as a document rather than fiction: the producers argued that the events were pieced together from amateur videos shot in 1989, and the marketing leaned heavily on that claim. The story follows a young journalist, H.B., drawn by odd village stories in the newspapers of January 1989. Frightened locals speak of creatures walking at night and of jinn. After weeks without seeing anything unusual, he leaves his camera with a local youth and goes back to Istanbul. Three days later the gendarmes detain him: seven people, the youth among them, have been torn apart. Released after his statement, he vanishes, his belongings left in the forest. Through all of it the cameras keep rolling.