Uğur Polat

At Turkey’s oldest zoo, a lonely manager and a neglected female officer form an unlikely bond: as they hide the death of the zoo’s oldest inhabitant, an Anatolian leopard, in order to stop the privatization process and fake its escape, they set in motion an absurd charade that spins out of control. In Turkey’s grey and quiet capital, the ghost of the leopard persists.

An unforgettable love that overcomes all obstacles, even time, distance and falling apart.

Tamer, reliant on friends to navigate life, Aslı, aimless and living with family while tending to a sick neighbor, and Celil, an ordinary caregiver emotionally detached but devoted to his patients until death, cross paths in a poignant exploration of interdependence and survival.

Film from Baris Atay

Two historical incidents that deepened the friendship between Japan and Turkey are connected in this story of friendship and compassion: In the night of 16 September 1890 the Turkish frigate Ertuğrul is caught up in a typhoon and sinks off the Japanese coast. Risking their own lives, local villagers are able to rescue 69 Turkish sailors. Although being very poor and having hardly to eat, the villagers share what little they have with strangers from a country 9,000 kilometers away. 95 years later, during the Iran-Iraq War, more than 300 Japanese are stranded in Tehran. In the morning of 19 March 1985 a Turkish Airlines aircraft takes off for Tehran to evacuate the Japanese. But the remaining Turks at Tehran Mehrabad Airport still need to be convinced that they won't be able to board their own country's rescue flight.

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)

No plot available for this movie.

Daniel no longer wants to know anything about his job at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. After a tragic accident during a surveillance operation in the neo-Nazi scene, he tries to resign. Instead of pursuing his request, he is housed in a run-down apartment in Berlin's Neukölln district for his own protection. To his own surprise, Daniel quickly makes friends not only with his new, unfamiliar surroundings, but also with the Arab second-hand goods dealer Abbas. But just as Daniel begins to take heart, his boss from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution turns up on Daniel's doorstep. He has anything but good news in his luggage...

In the course of a day in Istanbul, five individuals cross paths and change each others' lives in unexpected ways.

No plot available for this movie.