Burak Çevik

This haunted reverie drops us inside an Istanbul retirement home, where the battle-scarred residents revel in the camera’s attention. A creaky-voiced woman shares her personal account of the Armenian genocide, a sweetly deluded pianist performs a composition before confessing his love and a blind photographer fiddles with his flash as he points his own camera back at us. All the while, however, the ominous transformation of the land is taking place at the hands of construction machinery.

A murder investigation is flipped inside out in Burak Çevik's second feature, a spellbinding and surprising work that questions whether we can ever truly understand criminal motives. We begin in the present as an unseen narrator recounts the assassination of his lover's disapproving mother, accompanied by hauntingly vacant images of urban alienation and garish city lights; we then flash back to witness the first encounter between the lovers-turned-accomplices, their mutual attraction and world-weariness emerging across a sleepless night and morning after. Çevik imbues the proceedings with a stylistic confidence and willingness to bend the conventions of cinematic form to arrive at a complex, gripping double meditation on love and death.

At midnight, two lab assistants study an unknown substance using machines and procedures that are unclear to us. They pursue knowledge through the strict logic of the laboratory. As exhaustion settles in, one of the assistants brews Turkish coffee for the other, and the night shifts. The process becomes a fortune-telling, and the scientific gaze gives way to intuition. Moving from analysis to foresight, the two women imagine another method of knowing; a space where rational inquiry and intuitive perception coexist.

In 1978, five leftist youths who believed that the leftist revolution could be realized through politics, not violence, gathered in a house and started to talk about the magazine they had published. The unexpected events that take place later that night reveal the political chaos in Turkey before the 1980 coup d'état.

Nesrin and Erdem talk about their relationship, which they don’t remember in exactly the same way. Çevik’s visually stunning essay uses their conversations to forge a pensive treatise on what it means to forget, where word and image play an equal role.

Burak Çevik’s film reworks the stark black-and-white compositions of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s 1984 film Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations) in which German locations stand in for the imagined country of Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika. Here, however, depopulated interiors and desolate outdoor spaces carry the phantasmic traces of humanity—voices, shadows, photographs, cars—but never let them appear, suggesting a world in which all connections to the social have come untethered.

Yılmaz is the dealer and close friends of famous filmmakers and actors. With the increasing drug operations in Istanbul, Yılmaz is getting paranoid about not being loved by them anymore. This paranoia makes him take bigger risks day by day and he will be destroyed by the desire for being loved.

A criminal lawyer Canan, divides her time in the courthouse and mother's hospital bed at night. She has to make a moral choice that will affect lives of her mother, judge and murder suspect client.