Miracle

Featuring seven different yet intertwined stories of modern life in Istanbul, 7 Faces is a thought-provoking drama centering on seven characters living in the same city apartment building. Each of them faces a major change in their lives, which requires them to confront their biggest fear or weakness.

Inhospitable at the best of times, the snow-covered mountainscapes of Eastern Anatolia constituted a fatal frontier for many war exiles after the battle of Sarikamish in 1915, and provides a canvas laced with beauty and threat for this bone-chilling survival yarn, the superb debut feature of Alphan Eşeli. Starting out with three characters – a refugee mother and daughter and their grizzled guide – the film traces their daunting trek across this barren terrain to safety, with the Russians encroaching and other stragglers, including a pair of wounded, frostbitten Ottoman soldiers, all orbiting the same burnt-out village they find in their path. Puncturing its aura of ghostly impasse with some shocking narrative reversals, and constantly prickling with the mutual dread of strangers in gruelling extremes, the movie stakes out hugely credible ground next to established Eastern Front war classics (In the Fog, Come and See) while remaining thoroughly its own beast. (Source: LFF programme)

Driven by revenge, human-turned-vampire Mia sets out to vanquish Dmitry, a ruthless vampire leader who seeks an artifact that grants immortality.

On the fog-drenched Black Sea coast, a woman gives birth to a being that defies nature. As her body and mind begin to unravel, love becomes both her devotion and her disease.

Coastliners puts the theme of “human rights” together with different stories, and consists of five short fiction films made by internationally acclaimed different directors. We accompany the personal effects of refugees washed ashore, the peculiar story of an assaulted young man, a mother and daughter who take refuge in a house when bombs sound on the Syrian border, a hero stuck in the hurly burly of Istanbul, trying to overcome obstacles; and the her spiritual journey of a pregnant woman trying to return to her village from where she was cast away.