Emin Alper: Last News

Edward Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front and Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast top the European Film Academy’s Excellence Awards honoring achievement in the arts and crafts categories, the winners of which were announced on Wednesday.

Jessica Kiang Compassion is in almost as short supply as water in Emin Alper’s sardonic, seething Un Certain Regard breakout “Burning Days,” a parched little parable about small-town corruption in chokingly patriarchal rural Turkey. Beginning and ending on the lip of a massive sinkhole on the village outskirts, and featuring a manhunt that echoes a wild boar hunt and a mirage-like lake whose waters may or may not be toxic, here, the cool filmmaking is subtler than the metaphors.

On the one hand, Emin Alper’s Burning Days is a discreet but telling account of the resurgence of homophobia — a key plank of right-wing populism — in Turkey. On the other hand, it’s a half-and-half genre film: half crime thriller and half western.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentTurkish screenwriter and director Emin Alper, whose dystopian drama (“Frenzy”) in 2015 made a splash in Venice and who more recently helmed hit TV series “Aleph” about two detectives on the trail of a dervish-turned-serial killer in Istanbul, is in Cannes for the first time with incendiary drama “Burning Days” screening in Un Certain Regard.It’s about a young and earnest prosecutor named Emre who gets pulled into corrupt populist politics while investigating a murder and forms a bond with the owner of the local newspaper.Alper spoke to Variety about how “Burning Days” reflects the rise of authoritarian populism and mounting homophobia, and not just in his country. ExcerptsOver the past years I’ve been surprised to see that similar things are happening around the world. We experienced Trump, for example.

Katherine Tulich The Sydney Film Festival has completed the selection for its first full in-person edition in three years with a strong Australian lineup and a smattering of Cannes titles. The 2022 edition runs June 8 – 19, 2022.After COVID disruptions saw the 2021 edition delayed from June until November, it has been a quick six-month turnaround to return the 2022 festival to its regular winter slot.