Between Two Dawns

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.

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.

A young student moves in with an estranged family friend in Istanbul, trading her humble hometown for a city that tests her identity — and convictions.