Based on more than 40 interviews and extensive archival research, Hakan Barçın’s chronicle of the life and legacy of this defining force in Foça’s development represents an oral history initiative that sheds light on Foça’s recent past.

Uprooted from their mountain village as small children, today, Yayla is a space of longing for both İsmail Hikmet Sevim and Bahattin Akgül. Director Yalçın Yalın’s short documentary takes a nostalgic look back at this village in Safranbolu through the eyes – and cameras – of its former inhabitants.

An austere fortress set atop the cliffs of Granada, Spain, the Alhambra was a paradise constructed during the 13th-15th-centuries for the last Sultans of al-Andalus. Marc Jampolsky’s award-winning film lets us in on the secrets behind the beauty and durability of this man-made paradise.

Hatay has always been a cosmopolitan region, hosting 13 different civilizations and three monotheistic religions whose followers have lived side by side for centuries. Shot after the devastating earthquake of 2023, ‘Antioch Milad’ documents the first post-quake Christmas celebrations, which represent not just a holiday, but a ‘milad’ – a rebirth – for the community.

As much a thriller as a documentary, Evan Carpenter’s “Artifact War” follows a team of archaeologists who go undercover in ISIS territory to monitor the theft and smuggling of ancient artifacts, only to discover a web of terror, corporate corruption, and the illegal sale of material cultural heritage in the most shocking places.

A young Turkish immigrant to San Francisco sets out on a quest to discover how the Bay Area became a hotbed for Balkan music and how it influenced the local music scene. Overflowing with amazing rhythm and melodies, Tuğrul Sarıkaya’s feature doc Balkancisco presents the personal stories of musicians from diverse cultural backgrounds – and lots of great music.

The life and times of a cultural icon, with newly digitized footage from Bedri Rahmi’s 8-mm film archives plus interviews with Ara Güler, Cengiz Bektaş, Mustafa Pilevneli, Teoman and Gülseren Südor, Hughette and Rahmi Eyüboğlu, and more. A tribute to Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu on the 50th anniversary of his death.

Combining archival material from East and West Germany with the words and music of singer-songwriter Bettina Wegner, Lutz Pehnert’s documentary lets a new audience discover the life and music of this determined folk singer, who really only ever wanted to sing love songs.

Thrilling reconstructions, interviews with archaeologists, and spectacular footage reveal the life, decline and rebirth of Campo della Fiera, once a federal sanctuary of the Etruscans, who dominated much of Italy until the late 5th century BC.

With its traditional parade of papier-mâché floats, the Carnival of Fano, Italy’s oldest Carnival, is more than a simple celebration; it’s a feeling, a state of mind that warms the heart of a city and the surrounding region. Award-winning director Andrea Lodovichetti captures the excitement in his latest feature documentary.

“Who was Ertuğrul Muhsin Bey?” To answer this question, we get help from some of the first films produced in Turkey back in the 1920s and 1930s, plus recent interviews with Haldun Dormen, Ayla Algan and Efdal Sevinçli.

When the director of Russia’s Museum of Architecture discovers some moldy old frescoes in a museum storeroom, she sets off on a search to locate and save the entire set of unique images of the Apocalypse. Director Ella Tukhareli’s hybrid documentary makes a timely comparison between the 17th-century frescos and 21st-century environmental collapse.

‘If everything should be forgotten, why did my father film so much?’ is a question director Nadja Anane poses close to the beginning of her feature essay/documentary, Grain of Sand. Anane herself uniquely combines archival footage and experimental visualization to retell (imagine?) the history of Figuig, an oasis near the Moroccan-Algerian border.

The bond between arrow and bow, the mastery of craft and sport… This short doc will take you on a colourful journey into the fascinating history of Turkish archery, from ancient battlefields to the modern Olympics.

With a stack of 8-mm home movies as her starting point, award-winning director Matleena Jänis tells the story of grief, loss, and the joy of summer cabin life in the Finnish lake landscape.

Against a background of old black and white photos, Yorgo Zarbozan (Barba Yorgo) reminisces about the peaceful life growing up on İmroz/Gökçeada before tensions arose between communities over “that damned Cyprus.” This short doc from director Deniz Devrez beautifully portrays a difficult subject within a framework of tolerance.

This documentary from , Zehra Yiğit and Perihan Taş Öz represents a pilgrimage of sorts, following the route taken in 1914 by Hungarian traveler-photographer Zsigmond Fejes, with music provided by Bela Bartok, archivist of Anatolian folk music.

On the coast of the Bering Sea, where time has stopped, a father and son make a living by fishing. Theirs is an intimate relationship, imbued with tenderness and the harshness of life on the edge of the earth. Aliaksandr Tsymbaliuk’s award-winning documentary bears witness to their story and their vanishing culture.

A poetic look at the stone guardians carved by peasant craftsmen that stand watch over the cemeteries of Western Serbia, director Predrag Todorovic presents a sandstone narrative – a ‘carved archive’ – of ordinary individuals in an extraordinary landscape.

If you’re curious about the surprisingly varied roles of women in Ancient Greece, a collection of clay vases or marble tombstones can be just as revealing as a written archive. Inspired by historian Mary Lefkowitz, Nikos Dayandas’s documentary features interviews with Classical scholars who show us how to read material culture as unwritten history.

Several centuries after the Zeus Altar was moved from Bergama to Berlin, Aslı migrated in the opposite direction. Not quite essay, not quite fiction, not quite documentary – the inability to easily locate Eren Aksu’s short film Other Than That, I’m Fine, set in both Berlin and Bergama, suits its subject.

Against an abstract background comprised of an extraordinarily close look at the sights and sounds of Foça’s Küçük Deniz, Deborah Semel Demirtaş’s essay muses about life in Foça in this experimental short-short film.

Animated postcards, documents and vacation photos reveal the comic and the tragic sides of a ‘holiday in the sun’ for the first GDR citizens to fly to Mallorca in the spring of 1990, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification.

Using the 21st-century technology of AI-assisted animation, this short doc takes us back in time to the 3rd century BCE, when the world’s first known artists’ union was founded in the ancient city of Teos.

From chasing down relics in the houses of the elderly to inspiring young women to connect with their cultural heritage, historian Tanzila Dzaurova is working single-handedly to revive the Ingushetia art of carpet felting, while also helping provide economic opportunities for Ingush women.

The film Mouramani, said to be the first feature by a Black African Francophone director, was shot in 1953. A half-century later, director Thierno Souleymane Diallo went searching for this lost treasure. Filled with Souleymane’s uniquely eclectic mix of absurd humour and seriousness, The Cemetery of Cinema documents what becomes a poetic quest about cinema – both the kind we watch and the kind we make.

In 1980, Ed Winslow Bastian, a filmmaker and student of Buddhism, was asked to document the Dalai Lama’s visit to the United States for the first-ever Kalachakra ceremony to be held outside of Tibet or India. But lack of funding kept Bastian’s remarkable footage languishing in the Smithsonian Institution’s refrigerated archives in Washington, D.C. for 38 years…

Featuring a wealth of photographs documenting Foça’s cultural past, Şenay Kızılateş’s short doc introduces us to a local legend: Karanfilli Doğan, erstwhile driver of a horse-drawn carriage that was a fixture of the town’s fledgling tourism industry.

Howling winds, barking dogs, wild waves crashing upon the coast outside Foça and the noise of military exercises from barracks on the other side of the mountain create a dystopian atmosphere in this film without dialogue from award-winning director Handan İpekçi.

It might not mean much to learn that a ballet dancer had grown up in a village – but when the same small village in Anatolia has raised 13 ballet dancers? That’s something special. Fatih Diren’s documentary takes us to Başpınar, a seemingly ordinary village in Turkey, but one where classical ballet is taken seriously.

The majestic Zagros Mountains of Iran are home to Bakhtiari nomads whose way of life is a true dance in symbiosis with nature. Today, this ancestral dance is being challenged by the realities of modernity.

Near the Diyarbakır-Mardin border is one of the best-preserved Roman garrisons in the world and the only Temple of Mithras still standing on what was once Rome’s eastern border. The magical atmosphere and remarkable history has elevated ‘Zerzevan Castle and Mithraeum’ to Türkiye’s Tentative List of World Cultural Heritage.