We compiled the films you should not miss at the 42nd Istanbul Film Festival, which will be held between 7-18 April.
If I was choosing a sentence from the films that I remember to describe the 41st Istanbul Film Festival, I would say “Life is a dream”. This was one of the most famous phrases of Gasper Noe’s Vortex, which was shown at the festival last year. For Vortex, tens people formed in front of Atlas Passage. When I think about that night, now I realize that perhaps this moment remains in my memory more than all the films I saw at the festival. Just as life is a dream, the festival was like a beautiful dream with its overflowing crowd. That’s why, today we are excited since another film festival coming, and we share this excitement with Saatolog readers with the list of movies we compiled from this year’s festival program.
Aşk, Ateş ve Anarşi Günleri, Önder Esmer
The roots of the Turkish Cinematheque Association are laid when Onat Kutlar went to Paris to study philosophy in 1961 and discovered his passion for cinema with the French Cinematheque he went to in those years. The Turkish Cinematheque Association was founded a few years later, in 1965, by Onat Kutlar and a group of intellectuals. Art films from all over the world are shown at the Cinematheque, which has attracted a great deal of attention beyond expectations. Moreover, not only films are screened here, but it also becomes a place where an intellectual film culture emerges and where a new generation of filmmakers, critics and cinephiles grow. Aşk, Ateş ve Anarşi Günleri brings the traces of Onat Kutlar’s life together with the audience, while bringing Cinematek’s conflicted relationship with Yeşilçam and its influence on Turkish cinema to the big screen.
Other People’s Children by Rebecca Zlotowski
40-year-old Rachel has no children, but she has everything she wants: many students, friends, ex-boyfriend and guitar lessons… When she falls in love with Ali, her life will change and she will become attached to Ali’s four-year-old daughter, Leila. Through Rachel’s story, director Rebecca Zlotowski delves deeper into the bonds one can form with other people’s children. Zlotowski says that she feels in solidarity with women who do not have children with Other’s Children, which she described as a love letter that shotting during her pregnancy.
