32nd. Cairo International Film Festival
The International Feature Films Competition
The messenger | Ulak
SYNOPSIS: A mysterious stranger with lots of secrets and a lot to say in his tales pays a visit to a village where people are desperate because of the fear and cruelty they have been suffering. Will the stranger give them hopes to overcome their fears? What are people afraid of? Are sins and crimes punished sooner or later?
Director : Cagan Irmak
Cast : Çetin Tekindor, Hümeyra , Yetkin Dikinciler, Şerif Sezer
Production : Avsar Film - 2008
Time : 102min
Official Selection: Out of Competition
Three Monkeys | Director :Nuri Bilge Ceylan
International competition for Digital Feature Films
Dot | Director : Dervis Zaim
Human Rights Films
Hidden Faces | Director :Handan Ipekci
Havar | Director :Mehmet Guleruz
Refugee | Director :Reis Celik
A family dislocated when small failings blow up into extravagant lies, battles against the odds to stay together by covering up the truth... In order to avoid hardship and responsibilities that would otherwise be impossible to endure, the family chooses to ignore the truth, not to see, hear or talk about it. But does playing Three Monkeys invalidate the truth of its existence?
Young Yusuf, 18-years-old, is disconcerted when he learns that his mother Fatma, 40- years-old, is having a secret affair with the town’s railroad stationmaster. Should he behave in accordance with the traditional male-dominated culture and traditions of the town or should he develop a new perspective that goes along with the new modernization process that is on-going in the area?
Burhan a young man in his mid-twenties, works at the post office. His job is allocating the incoming letters according to their addresses. He lives alone. His mother and sister are dead. His father is a retired army officer who is now a senile and lives in a clinic. He likes a girl that he has never disclosed his feelings to. He has his own way of building a relationship with her that causes him trouble. Despite the troubles he faces, he manages to go on with his life thanks to a letter addressed to someone else. Burhan will start behaving in an strange manner and he will pose as someone else through this letter. What will this new situation bring? Will the “shell” that Burhan lives in break? Will he find a way out from his alienated life?
When three forty-something siblings in Istanbul receive a call one night that their aging mother has disappeared from her home at the western Black Sea coast of Turkey, the three set out to find her, momentarily setting aside their problems. As the siblings come together, the tensions between them quickly become apparent, like Pandora’s box spilling open. They come to realize that they know very little about each other and are forced to reflect on their own shortcomings.
As the fruit of 350 hours of footage and 5 years of labor and creative study, "Lost Songs of Anatolia" may be the first example of its kind as a documentary-musical film. The cultural riches of Anatolia are sung in authentic performances recorded live on location, spontaneously. Through the modern arrangements, an incomparable musical is formed. While this journey shows how music and culture is derived from life, geography and work, an exploration of Anatolia’s versatile cultures takes place on the basis of music, dance and rituals. The staggering environment surrounding these people and influencing their lifestyles contributes to the lyric flow of the film.
Dot is the story of a man tormented by a crime he once committed, who now seeks to redeem himself. The action, which advances along an axis of crime and punishment, organically incorporates one of Turkey’s traditional art forms, calligraphy, into the story. One of the most striking ways in which calligraphy marks both language and content is the film’s structure as a single, fluid shot.
Sentenced to prison in 1997 as a university student at the age of 22, Yusuf is released on health grounds 10 years later. He returns to his village in the Black Sea region, where he’s welcomed only by his sick and elderly mother. It turns out that his father died while he was in prison and his older sister got married and moved away to the city. Economic factors mean that it’s almost exclusively old people who live in the mountain villages, and the only person Yusuf sees is his childhood friend Mikhail. As autumn slowly gives way to winter, Yusuf meets Eka, a beautiful Georgian hooker. Neither the timing nor the circumstances are right for these two people from different worlds. Even so, love becomes a final desperate attempt to grasp life and elude loneliness.
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