France
80
69th edition. October 18-26, 2024
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Cafer, a Turkish worker, moves his family from their Turkish village to Germany. He has always regarded Germany as the country of endless opportunities, but his new life there brings with it many unexpected difficulties. His wife becomes involved in the women’s movement and undergoes changes both outwardly and mentally based on the friends she makes there; the older son is lonely and doesn’t want to go to school; the daughter has to stay home and take care of her newborn brother.
He was born in Istanbul (Turkey) in 1947. Already at the age of twenty, he began working in his uncle’s sound studio, and in the 70s he became an assistant director at Birsel Film. His debut film, ‘The Bad Spirits of the Euphrates’ (1978), won numerous awards at international festivals such as San Remo, Antalya, Varna or Chicago. At the personal invitation of the mayor of West Berlin, Dietrich Stobbe, he settled there to prepare and shoot his film ‘Black Head’ (1979). After the film was banned in 1980, he went into exile in Germany for six years before returning to Turkey, where he resumed his directing work with ‘Chain’ (1988). Unable to release that film in his native country, he faced censorship and began directing commercials, before returning to feature directing in 2015 with ‘You Left Me Desperate’.
