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Watchtower
Haunted by his dark past, a man takes a job as a fire warden in a remote tower in the wilderness, and is inexorably drawn towards a young woman with a terrible secret of her own. (TIFF)
Pelin Esmer
Pelin Esmer
Casts & Crew
Olgun Şimşek
Nilay Erdönmez
Laçin Ceylan
Menderes Samancılar
Rıza Akın
Also Directed by Pelin Esmer
This is a documentary about a passionate collector. A man who has been collecting for 70 years, collecting everything one can imagine. A man who lives in his own house like a guest of his collections. A man who tries to freeze time, as if to hold on to present. In this documentary, you will follow this passionate collector through the vivid streets of Istanbul, among the crowd, in search of new collection items while trying to understand his perception of life and collection.
A film by Pelin Esmer
When nine peasant women from a mountain village in southern Turkey decide to write and perform a play based on their life stories, aspects of their personalities emerge that they never knew existed. Esmer's documentary observes the creative stages leading up to the production of the play, and shows us how nine subtly but significantly different women emerge after its staging.
Leyla, a lawyer and a poet, takes the long-distance train to attend her high school reunion dinner. On the train, she meets Canan, a young nursing student in distress. As the conversation develops, Leyla learns that Canan is travelling to assist with the suicide of a paralysed man, Yavuz, who wants to die. At the end of the long over- night trip, surrounded by the stories of people both on and off the train, Leyla decides to accompany Canan on her difficult visit.
10 to 11 is the story of a passionate collector Mithat and the concierge of the building, Ali. For Mithat Istanbul is as vast as his collections and for Ali is nothing more than a few blocks around the building. When the neighbors decide to have the building rebuilt with the fear of earthquake and the wish for a more valuable house, Mithat's most challenging struggle to save his collections begins. The building becomes the common destiny of these two men living alone. Their relationship that begins with the collaboration to save the continuity of the collections changes track with Mithat's handing Istanbul over to Ali and ends when they involuntarily change each other's fate.
Shakespeare's 'King Lear' travelling on the dusty and risky roads to the remotest forgotten villages in the mountains of Turkey where even drinking water can hardly reach, turns delicately into 'Queen Lear' in the hands of a peasant-women theatre group. In the early 2000s, a handful of peasant women from the mountains of southern Turkey formed a theater group, which later became the subject of the documentary, The Play. The women acted out their own life stories in the village, and the play changed their lives. Now, they take to the road with an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, traveling the dusty, dangerous roads to the farthest-flung mountain villages where there isn't even running water. On the road, their lives merge with the world of King Lear and become bound up with "the good and the bad", "the young and the old", "the rich and the poor", "the honest and the dishonest" of the play.