Film program at Istanbul Modern

ISTANBUL

The Istanbul Modern Cinema will present a film program to run parallel to the 15th Istanbul Biennial, which takes “a good neighbor” as its theme. 

Based on the notion of neighborhood, the program looks at our ways of sharing the same locality. 

Touching on subjects such as sharing the same neighborhood, meeting in a square, walking in the same streets, being someone’s next-door neighbor, and standing in solidarity and resistance, the selection features films such as “America Square” by Yannis Sakaridis, which tells about the migrant crisis in Europe through a local square; “Colossal Youth,” the latest film in a trilogy about Lisbon’s now-demolished Fontainhas neighborhood by Pedro Costa; “My Neighbor Totoro” by Hayao Miyazaki, which tells the fantastical neighborhood story between sisters and the magical guardian of a forest and the Argentinean film “The Distinguished Citizen” about a Nobel Prize-winning author who returns to his hometown for the first time after 40 years.

The first two episodes of the well-known Turkish series “Perihan Abla,” which the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) brought to Turkish television screens the sense of a neighborhood community, which was on the verge of extinction even in 1986 when the series was shot, will be screened. 

The films can be seen between Sept. 21 and Oct. 1.