The Insiders

Nine stories of resistance against solitary confinement of political prisoners in Turkey.

The outcomes of the isolation system and its influence on human life will be told both by the victims and the witnesses.

In a snowy Kurdish mountain village, in the east of Turkey, an old woman Berfé and her granddaughter Jiyan are distressed. The only man in the household, Temo, the son of one and the father of the other, was arrested by the Turkish military. The commanding officer has been told that the villagers are hiding weapons, so he arrested all the men and announced that they will be kept in prison until their families hand over the weapons. The problem is that there are no weapons in the village. Desperate, Berfé and Jiyan embark on a long journey, in search of a gun which they could exchange for their beloved Temo. Will the old woman and her innocent granddaughter find a way out of the inextricable Kurdish identity conflict?

Ayça and Hama Ali are together in spirit, but divided by geography. With the outbreak of the Iraq War leaving him stranded, she embarks on an odyssey from Turkey to be reunited with him.

Kadir İnanır writes in order to not forget every moment of his early professional life. This process of recording is not limited to writing. He consolidates this archive first with photographs and then with images. His archive includes behind-the-scenes footage from many films, thousands of photographs, some of the costumes he used in his films and priceless diaries. Hüseyin Karabey, who has been filming Kadir İnanır at regular intervals for about 13 years, based on his yet-to-be-published autobiography, shares with us an important part of the history of Turkish cinema through the actor’s testimony.