Film FARUK by Aslı Özge

Turkey, France, Germany 2024/ Director: Aslı Özge/ Cast: Faruk Özge, Aslı Özge a.o./ 97 min. | Turkish. Original language/ from 12 years

Faruk Özge, a 90-year-old man played by Faruk Özge, who plays himself, is the father of Asli Özge, who is the director of the film FARUK (2024) and also plays himself here, as the director of the film FARUK (2024). This Faruk Özge is affected by the demolition of his apartment block in Istanbul and regularly attends meetings of the building management to counteract this. Asli Özge, who attends these meetings with her father and wants to make a documentary film about them in order to record the brutal changes that are being imposed on people by the city’s gentrification policy, increasingly focuses on her relationship with her father. Her humorous experiment came to fruition at the Berlinale 2024 and was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize.

Turkish director Aslı Özge, born in 1975, has been moving between Berlin and Istanbul for more than twenty years – and her films between documentary sobriety and fictional staging. In Germany, she shoots cool, analytical feature films such as AUF EINMAL (2016) and BLACK BOX (2023), while in Turkey she makes true-to-life and emotionally gripping documentaries that consciously and playfully work with fi ctional elements and push the boundaries of documentary storytelling.

On 24.01. there will be a film talk with director Aslı Özge and cinematographer Emre Erkmen afterwards!