Overview: A painter with a turbulent history, fiercely committed to his ideals and still averse to settling down despite his 70 years; a lawyer who packed in his job after suffering a heart attack and now pursues a quiet life looking after his pet snail; a doctor already disenchanted with his profession and now discarded by his wife; a career woman braving life on her own, who has made loneliness a life style. These characters are all patrons of Black & White, an Ankara bar that has been around for 25 years, and in a sense the bar is their last haven. The owner, meanwhile, is the irritable, easily offended but utterly lovable Faruk... Black & White is a film about the awareness of growing old, friendship, sensitivity and the finer details of life.
Overview: A love affair threatened by a barrier as great as itself... Can differences of faith stand in the way of an innocent love affair? Two young people, Esma and Mustafa, fall in love. For them, the future only has meaning if they are together. Failing this, life is meaningless. However, overhanging their love is a barrier unique to the period and location: Mustafa is a clandestine Christian, when everyone including Esma thinks he is Muslim. In the meantime, the Ottoman Empire introduces a series of reforms giving Christians the same rights as Muslims. From this point on, the Church urges secret Christians to reveal their faith. This poses a dilemma for Mustafa: he is caught between his love and the Church.
Overview: A cab driver, a teahouse owner and an out-of-work journalist live in a down-at-heel suburb of Ankara. When the driver tells his friends tales of the murky and unlawful dealings of his passengers, they install a camera to record the passengers.
Overview: While serenading a wedding that quickly implodes, a nomadic musician falls for the bride, who runs afoul of her family. Now he has to save her life.
Overview: A group of young people are trying to teach Kurdish in Turkish Kurdistan, a land where the teaching of the language is forbidden by Turkish authorities. Part of their work is to print clandestine schoolbooks in underground schools and distribute them. One of the girls in the group, Aseke, is killed on a mission and her friends decide to carry out the final request she made in her will. She had been brought up with a black horse, now in the remote Anatolian mountains, and her request is to bring the horse back so that they might meet one last time before she is buried. The arrival of the horse leads to some unexpected events.
Overview: Tuncel Kurtiz is an international actor who has worked in various countries such as Turkey, Germany, and Sweden throughout his fifty-year career. He has starred in countless works in cinema, stage and television and has received many awards, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. He has directed two documentaries and a feature-length fiction film. Kurtiz's acting performance ranges from popular melodramas to major plays such as Mahabharata (Peter Brook), encompassing many different genres and styles. As an actor, Kurtiz believes in the creative power of chaos: 'Chaos is the most difficult to create / Not a false chaos / Many things come out of chaos'. Through testimonies, film excerpts, and archive footage, this documentary reflects Tuncel Kurtiz's diverse body of artistic work in all its dimensions for the first time. In the background of this detailed portrait are Turkey's turbulent years and the reality of exile.
