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A workplace incident pitches a young man into a battle of conscience with his family and the law in Selman Nacar’s debut

Turkish director Selman Nacar made a strong impression with his debut feature, a tough workplace-negligence drama at last year’s San Sebastian film festival. Its indirect narrative style and sense of insidious bureaucratic evasion put me in mind of the Romanian new wave: particularly the performance of Erdem Senocak as Yasin, the bland company lawyer whose task is to pressurise the families of injured employees into signing away their legal rights.

Mucahit Kocak plays Kadir, a pleasant young man who, with his more business-minded elder brother Halil (Bedir Bedir), has taken over the management of the family’s textile factory, on the retirement of their father Ibrahim (Ünal Silver). The work is hard, and the factory is having difficulty delivering on orders, but Kadir is happy enough,...

Catalan director Clara Roquet’s teenage female friendship drama “Libertad” and Ferit Karahan’s social drama “Brother’s Keeper,” about Kurdish kids living in fear at a Turkish boarding school, won the best film awards respectively in the international and national competitions at Turkey’s 58th Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival which wrapped Saturday.

“Libertad,” a first feature that centers on a bond that forms during a summer in Spain’s Costa Brava between two young women from opposite sides of the tracks, was a recent Cannes Critics’ Week standout that has been making the festival rounds. Pic will soon segue from Antalya to the Rome Film Festival.

“Brother’s Keeper” is based on helmer Karahan’s own experience and follows two friends, Yusef and Memo, at a secluded boarding school for Kurdish boys in the mountains of Eastern Anatolia. When Memo falls mysteriously ill, Yusuf to try to help...

Jasmila Žbanić’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?” and Azra Deniz Okyay’s “Ghosts” won best film in the international and national competitions, respectively, at Turkey’s Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, the 57th edition of which concluded on Saturday.

Unable to attend the festival due to the pandemic, Žbanić sent a video message in which she said: “This film came about through the collaboration of nine different countries. I emphasize this because I think now, more than ever, we need to show that we’re trying to understand each other better by telling our different stories together. This award will help the film to be watched by more people, as well as bringing us together through our love of cinema and for each other.”

Iranian director Massoud Bakhshi won best director for “Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness.” Natasa Stork won best actress for “Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time.