Presenting Our Guest Country of Honor: Turkey

Every year, just to make sure Mexico doesn’t think it’s the only country in the world; The Guanajuato International Film Festival has a Guest Country of Honor with which to make a cultural Exchange through film. Which is why this year, the festival is proud to present a collection of Turkey’s most acclaimed cinema. Here are some Turkish films you shouldn’t miss this year:

Winter Sleep: One of the most celebrated filmmakers in Turkey today is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the Palm d’Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival with this film about three people stuck in a hotel by the winter snow. It’s one of those films about people forced to confront their conflicts while trapped in a location. The film might be 3 hours and 15 minutes, but come on, if you could take the running time in Titanic, why not here?

Once upon a Time in Anatolia: By the same director, we also present this film about the search for a dead body in the Anatolian steppes. This one tied for the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and competed for the Palm d’Or. Both this and Winter Sleep were Turkey’s submission to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (though neither was nominated, no one said the Academy always gets it right).

Honey: Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, this is the third film in Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Yusuf trilogy. Yusuf is a six-year-old boy who goes looking for his missing father, a beekeeper who went into the woods after all his bees were lost in an accident. It’s a film of very little dialogue, whose soundscape is mostly populated by the sounds of the forest.

The Butterfly’s Dream: This film by Yılmaz Erdoğan is one of Turkey’s most acclaimed films. It tells the tale of two good male friends living in Turkey in the 1940’s, who publish poems as part of the Garip movement. This film tells of the turns their lives take when they both fall in love and start building lives that pit them against a social class system and religious barriers of the time.

Sivas: Don’t miss the gala event that presents this film by Kaan Müjdeci about a boy and his dog. An 11-year-old boy rescues Sivas, a badly wounded, left for dead dog after a dogfight. As soon as he saves him, he uses the dog to impress his classmates and even organizes amateur dogfights. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.