L’heure d’hiver Istanbul

Once again in 2023, Cinema Galeries invites you to discover its selection of films for l’Heure d’Hiver, the festival that focuses on Middle Eastern cinema. In 2023, on the occasion of the centenary of the Turkish Republic, we will celebrate the city of Istanbul.

For this fifth edition of l’Heure d’Hiver, Cinema Galeries in partnership with European Endowment for Democracy, Bozar and Pink
Screens proposes to discover the essence of Turkish cinema through the ages; from recently restored classics to contemporary realisations, addressing the issues of our time.

Istanbul today has more than 15 million inhabitants, and its population continues to grow. The economic and cultural capital of Turkey, at the crossroads of the European and Asian continents, has been undergoing a profound transformation of its urban landscape for several decades. If the latter shows the history of the city and the different eras and influences that have shaped it, it also shows its current reality, or rather its realities.

Cinema takes us from the urban space to the lived space: it shows the fabric of the city (what creates the link), how people move around, how they live in the city, how they appropriate the transformations, in short how they live. The film Ah Gözel Istanbul by Zeynep Dadak takes us on a cinematographic journey of contemporary Istanbul based on Eremya Komurciyan’s «The History of Istanbul in the 17th Century». To understand this urban evolution and its social consequences, we propose a screening followed by a talk with Yoann Morvan and Sinan Logie, authors of Istanbul 2023. Translated and updated, it was published in Turkish under the same title in 2017. Then in 2019, it is reworked again to become Mega Istanbul. Traversées
en lisières urbaines. The editorial line is redesigned due to the evolution of the country.

The history of Turkey is also approached through its migratory flows, both internal and external, economic and political. Since the first displacements linked to the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish nation, the country has experienced significant population movements.

Today, this nation bordering Syria and Iraq hosts more than 4 million refugees, including 3.6 million Syrians, a «record» in the world. The young Turkish director Ayse Toprak, in Mr Gay Syria (2017), films the story of two gay Syrian refugees who, in order to stop being invisible (or rather invisibilised), try to participate in an international gay beauty contest.

Given the unfortunate recent events in Turkey and Syria, Cinema Galeries will adapt some of the after talks focusing on the political context in Turkey regarding urbanism and the consequences of the devastating earthquake. A donation box will be available throughout the festival and at the entrance of the party at C12.