Seeing Africa While Flying to the Moon

This story is about a beggar, a thief, and a child working on the street, a paper garbage collector, a leftist, a Muslim, a father, and a second-hand book dealer… Oktay Çetinkaya, full of life, tells us the stories of back streets, ghosts with whom he shared his own history, living as one of them.

Survivors tell the inside story of the massacre of the leftist students at Istanbul University on 16 March 1978 and the political atmosphere before the coup of 12 September 1980.

This documentary presents the past and present of Istanbul’s famed Grand Bazaar, whose history spans nearly five centuries. The film offers an intimate portrait of the bazaar through the perspective of a sherbet seller who has walked its streets for forty years, capturing the rhythms of daily life and the continuity of tradition within one of the city’s most enduring cultural spaces.