Meltem Cumbul Movies

Two lost souls find meaning in a world of chaos in this independent drama directed by Alejandro Chomski and adapted from the play by Wendy Hammond. Desperate teen Maggie (Angela Sarafayan) is on the run from her abusive father, and young immigrant David (Jesse Garcia) is scouring the streets of L.A. for his missing mother. When David and Maggie meet, their fractured lives finally start to make sense. A Beautiful Life also features Dana Delany and Debi Mazar. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Politically enforced racial prejudice is parodied in this dark comedy from Austria. Stefan (Karl Markovics) is a bureaucrat with the Austrian government who supervises immigration issues; Stefan's politics lean rather strongly to the right and he has little use for people from abroad. Stefan and his wife Marion (Julia Stemberger) are expecting a baby, and when Marion goes into labor, she arrives at the hospital's maternity ward at the same time as Emine (Meltem Cumbul) and her husband Emre (Ahmet Ugurlu), a couple of Turkish birth who are also about to have a child. Marion and Emine end up sharing a room, leading to an argument between Stefan and Emre. Emre's quarrel with Stefan turns out to be an omen of things to come; though he and his wife have been living in Austria for close to ten years, a mix-up with the immigration department forces the couple and their young child to return to Turkey. However, a nurse at the hospital informs Marion of a terrible mistake -- she was accidentally given Emine's baby, and vice versa, and so Stefan and Marion travel to Turkey, hoping to track down the recently deported couple and exchange their children. Geboren in Absurdistan was directed by Allahyari Houchang, who began his career in Iran before relocating to Vienna in the wake of the Islamic revolution. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

An elderly man falls for a younger woman with a troubled past in this drama from filmmaker Yavuz Turgul. Nazim (Sener Sen) is a teacher who left his native Istanbul to work at a school in a small Kurdish village in Turkey. After 15 years, Nazim retires from his work and returns home, only to find Istanbul is a very different place than it was when he went away. Nazim reacquaints himself with several of his old friends, including fellow former academic Takoz (Sumer Tilmac), and when Nazim discovers he's going to have to wait several months before he can begin receiving pension payments, Takoz arranges for him to get a job as a cab driver. As Nazim rides the streets of Istanbul's rougher neighborhoods at night, he makes friends with one of his regular fares, Dunya (Meltem Cumbul), an aspiring nightclub chanteuse. Dunya left her abusive husband, Halil (Timucin Esen), to make her way on her own, taking their young daughter with her, and Nazim feels protective toward the singer and her little girl. However, Halil isn't about to leave his wife without a fight, and things become more difficult when Nazim becomes smitten with Dunya. Lovelorn (aka Gonul Yarasi) received its North American premiere at the 2005 New York Turkish Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Turkey's most popular comedians, Kemal Sunal and Metin Akpinar, star in this darkly surreal comedy set in a sleepy village in the country's desert southeast in 1948. Sunal and Akpinar are close friends until Sunal gets appointed the new customs director. One day, Akpinar wakes up to discover that a barbed-wire fence has been strung through the center of the town, and he and his family are on the wrong side of the divide. He is now an inhabitant of an unspecified foreign nation. Meanwhile, the dull-witted Sunal struts around in his military uniform, getting drunk on his new-found power. Propaganda was screened at the 1999 Istanbul Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi