See a ‘feast of films’ at 2nd London Turkish Film Week, starts 24 April

Following its debut in December 2018, the 2^ndLondon Turkish Film Week (LTFW) springs back to life at the end of April.

Organised by the Yunus Emre Institute in Fitzrovia, the film festival takes place from 24 to 30 April 2019.

Twenty new features, shorts and documentaries, representing a feast of films that have found favour with audiences across Turkey, and among international film critics and festival juries, will be screened.

Venues include the historic Regent Street Cinema – one of the loveliest cinemas in London – and other venues across the capital including King’s College on the Strand, the School of Oriental Studies in the heart of Bloomsbury, and the sumptuous cinema inside the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, above Liverpool Street Station.

Some of the movies on the bill during the week-long festival include:

Let the Kid Play, a film about the birth and evolution of cinema in the Ottoman era, focusing on the spread of cinematic technology, from the 1890s into the 20th century. Featuring new documents and rarely seen stills, Let the Kid Play illuminates this moment of cinema history and poses new questions for cinema enthusiasts to ponder.

Yellow Heat is the striking directorial debut – already prized at Istanbul and Moscow Festivals- showing the struggles of a farming family caught between feudal traditions and modern developments.

In a tiny Anatolian town, a lonely barber falls for the younger singer of a visiting cabaret double-act. Yozgat Blues is the winner of many festival awards including the FIPRESCI (International Critics’) Prize at Warsaw.

Brothers has won numerous acting and directing awards, as it portrays the uneasy reunion of Yusuf, released from juvenile prison, and his feckless older brother is largely set around a seedy motelon the highway to Iran, well caught by the sharp wide-screen camera-work.

Halef is an award-winning mystical drama, beautifully filmed in Adana, to which Mahir returns to help with the orange harvest. He is startled to meet Halef, who believes he is the incarnation of Mahir’s dead brother.

Feeding the birds on the roof of his poor parents’ house in Adana helps young Yusuf find inner peace and resilience to face society outside. The Pigeon is a debut feature which won 18 festival awards, including Sofia’s Best Director, and Best Actor in Valencia.

Sideways is the story of how portents plague a small town, set ‘twixt a stormy sea and ominous forest. The sun turns black, Doomsday looms – is the young barista with a strange mark on his back the promised Saviour?

Turkish Ice Cream is set-and largely filmed- in New South Wales-and mostly in English, this latest epic from one of Turkey’s most successful new directors charts the exploits of two Turks living in Australia selling dondurma from a wheelbarrow.

As a tribute to the director Ömer Lütfi Akad, Law of the Border, restored in 2013 by the World Cinema Foundation at Cineteca di Bologna /L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Dadaş Films and the Turkish Ministry of Culture will also be presented.

The film made in 1966, co-written by and starring Yılmaz Güney who went on to win the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival with Yol (The Road), this story of smugglers in South East Turkey brought a new naturalism and was one of the first films to depict contemporary life unflinchingly with a father and young son struggling to survive in a remote, rural community.

Event Details

Title: 2^nd London Turkish Film Week

Date: Wednesday 24 to Tuesday 30 April 2019

For more information: visit the Yunus Emre Institute London website

Screenings:

Let The Kid Play – 7.00 pm, Wednesday 24 April

SOAS University of London, DLT Room, London WC1H 0XG

– Tickets £5.00

Guardian of Angels – 3.30 pm, Thursday 25 April

Yunus Emre Institute, Conference Room, 10 Maple Street, London W1T 5HA

– Tickets £5.00

Talk on Turkish Dramas – 7.00 pm, Thursday 25April

SOAS University of London, Brunei Gallery, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG

Entry is free, but register via Eventbrite

Public Debate “At the Flicks – or Netflix? – 10.30 am, Friday 26 April

Regent Street Cinema, 307 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HW

Entry is free, but register via Eventbrite

Cicero (18)- 7.30 pm, Friday 26 April

Regent Street Cinema, 307 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW