The Lincoln Center is hosting screenings of several films from renown Turkish film director Zeki Demirkubuz. He is one of several filmmakers of Anatolian heritage who is making his name known in cinema circles around the world. The others include the likes of Nuri Bilge Ceylan ("Distant," Climates") and Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin ("Head-On"). Akin's latest film was screened at the Toronto Film Festival last weekend.
The Lincoln Center's web site called Demirkubuz a contemporary filmmaker who is able to make a clear distinction between mental interiors and fantasy exteriors.
To date, none of Demirkubuz's films have been released in America, though he has been invited to several film festivals and special screenings, one of which occured at Duke University a few years ago.
Along with the likes of Ceylan, Yesim Ustaoglu and Handan Ipekci, Demirkubuz is leading a new wave of Turkish cinema which focuses on the artistic aspects of film as opposed to the pop cinema of the 1970s, which featured stars like Cuneyt Arkin and Turkan Soray.
Admitedly, Turkish pop cinema had a notorious reputation thanks to films like Arkin's "Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam/The Turkish Star Wars" (1982), directed by the ever-amusing Cetin Inanc. But, it was the same pop cinema which lead to the emergence of Turkey's first internationally cinematic figure, the politically controversial Yilmaz Guney, who died in 1984.
Demirkubuz was born in Isparta, Turkey, in 1964. He emerged as an assistant to Zeki Okten, who had worked with both Guney and pop cinema figures like the late comic actor Kemal Sunal.
Demirkubuz has directed films like "Block-C," about a troubled marriage from a woman's persepective set in a modern apartment in the suburban Atakoy district of Istanbul.
The films that will be part of the screenings include Demirkubuz's most recent effort "Destiny," which premieres on Sept. 21 as well as his films "Fate," Confession" and "Waiting Room."
The director will be at the Walter Reade Theatre on Sept. 22 at 3 p.m.
Though I live some 12 hours south of New York and can not make these screenings, I am personally delighted that Demirkubuz is continuing to grow in reputation.
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