ARTISTS VS. AUTOCRACY: Istanbul cinema crosses the bridge

Istanbul is home to some great filmmakers trying to speak truth to power... in a country where the power is less and less willing to let them. Host Rico Gagliano talks with two of the best — Emin Alper (BURNING) and Özcan Alper (AUTUMN) — about making art with a censor over your shoulder. He also takes a tour of Istanbul's historic cinemas... and is there to witness a dark day in Turkish politics.

Part travelogue, part deep-dive storytelling, the latest season sees host Rico Gagliano jet off to Ireland, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Istanbul, to learn about their cultures through the lens of cinema. Season 8’s guests include actors Gael García Bernal (AMORES PERROS) and Fiona Shaw (HOT MILK), writer/directors Rich Peppiatt (KNEECAP), Evan Goldberg (THE STUDIO) and Halina Reijn (BABYGIRL), producer Ed Guiney (POOR THINGS), production designer Eugenio Caballero (ROMA) and a host of other filmmakers, programmers, academics, cinema owners, critics, tour guides, and festival directors.

CROSSING THE BRIDGE – THE SOUND OF ISTANBUL is now streaming on MUBI worldwide. 

CROSSING is now streaming in the US, Canada, Latin America, Germany and Turkey. 

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone. Your host, Rico Gagliano here. Quick heads up: you're about to hear the final episode of a season you probably thought we ended a couple months ago. This episode deals with some serious political issues in the nation of Turkey, and we felt like we had to take extra time to get the details right. Meanwhile, I think events around the world, maybe especially in my home country, the USA, have only made it more relevant. Hope you agree and that it sparked some conversations.

And as always, beware: 0:26

spoilers ahead. One Saturday last March, around midnight, I was on a Turkish Airlines flight descending into Turkey's biggest city, Istanbul. Out the cabin window, I caught my first glimpse of hazy streetlights beneath us and I felt, I don't know how did I feel? Uneasy?<i>Dear passengers, as we are descending, make sure that your hand luggage</i><i>is stowed in the overhead bins.</i> It was a totally different feeling than the last time I flew here, 2011. When I remember only anticipation. Back then, Turkey was coming off an economic boom. The government had supposedly been liberalizing. It was negotiating to join the EU. Travel mags hyped Istanbul as the place to be, a vibrant fusion city. European and Asian, modern and ancient. Sure enough, I saw a hip art and grand mosques. It felt groovy, cosmopolitan, a cool place to be an artist. Now I know Turkey was headed in a way, different direction.<i>Oh, they list Baked Alaska. Ever eat it?</i><i>No.</i> This is a movie show, so I'll give you movie examples. Last year in Istanbul, this film, Luca Guadagnino's <i>Queer</i> was going to be the opening night film of MUBI Fest, a film festival MUBI curates in cities around the world. But then, just a few hours before the screening...<i>Its hot on the outside...</i><i>and cold inside.</i> The local governor banned the movie.<i>Queer</i>, you see, is about a gay relationship. The authorities said it was,"Provocative content that could endanger public peace." So MUBI decided to cancel the whole festival. A year before that, the country's biggest and longest running festival was canceled, the Antalya Golden Orange Film Fest. It's sin? Programing, a documentary critical of the Turkish government. Just a few months ago, a satirical Turkish flick about a rigged election, also banned. So much for a cool place to be an artist.<i>Ladies and gentlemen and dear children, welcome to Istanbul Airport</i><i>meeting point of the world.</i><i>We hope that you had a pleasant flight. For your safety, please remain seated...</i> As the jet pulled into our gate and I got ready to step off, I had to wonder what had I missed the first time around? How did the country change so fast? Turns out the changes had been brewing for years and I was going to be there for the biggest one yet. I'm Rico Gagliano. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's, the film company that champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. Today we wrap up season eight. We've been calling it 'Traveling Shots'. Every episode I've been taking a tour through the film scene in a different international city to meet its best filmmakers, learn about the ways people there make and watch movies, and try to understand why they do it that way. This week, Istanbul, an amazing city, split in half by the Bosphorus Strait into a Europe side and an Asia side. That's also got a split political personality. On the surface, a democracy, but in practice more and more autocratic. Compared to Iran we have some freedoms. We had some freedoms. But I don't know what will happen from today on. Probably I will have more difficulty in even showing my films in cinemas. That is Emin Alper, one of Turkey's greatest living filmmakers. And I talked to him and many others about what it's like to make movies in a place like this, about the passionate audience they make them for. They will be like hundreds, maybe sometimes thousands of people out in the street, you know, talking about films. And about the political earthquake I woke up to on the last day of my visit. As the far right rises worldwide, there are take-aways for all of us. So here's a story of beauty and bravery. The film scene, past and present of Istanbul. So, in my opinion, one of the coolest movies of this century is about Istanbul and the arts, in a relatively happier time. It's called <i>Crossing the Bridge</i>, a documentary about the city's music scene circa 2005, which was so happening it attracted folks like this guy.<i>My name is Alexander Hacke, bassist for Einstürzende Neubauten.</i> That's Alexander Hacke, bassist of the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten. He spends the movie prowling the city, recording and jamming with local bands, on boats, in apartments, in underground clubs, and also hanging out in his room at an old world hotel. In the opening scene, he lights up a smoke with rock star cool cracks open the window... and listens to the sound of Muslim calls to prayer from the city outside. So of course I had to start my trip in the same hotel. It's called the Grand Hotel de Londres, established 1890, in a bustling corner of town called Beyoglu. And it is a time machine. Hello. Checking in.- Check in?- Yeah.- What's the name?- Gagliano.- Gagliano?- Yeah.- <i>Pasaporte, por favor</i>.- There you go. This place was the spot for 19th century Europeans who'd just come to town on the Orient Express. And the lobby looks like nothing has changed since. There's chandeliers, crushed velvet curtains, antique armchairs with antique lumpy upholstery, a fireplace with an old model of a clipper ship on the mantel. It is awesome. And up in my room, so is the view. Well, here I am... in Istanbul, and I just forgotten how unbelievably cool it is. I'm looking out from my balcony across the Bosphorus. I think I'm looking at part of the European side, and it's kind of, it's hilly. It's a kind of, you know, San Francisco-y vibe to the landscape, which makes sense since they both have a lot of earthquakes. And the entire hillside is just covered with housing and trees. And the houses are everything from little boxes to, you know, every quarter mile or so, these grand, unbelievably beautiful mosques rising up, they're all lit up. Each mosque with its domes, its multiple domes, has also these, like tall spires. So in <i>Crossing the Bridge</i>, Alexander Hacke leans out just like this and looks out at the city. I feel really cool right now. Yeah, from up there, you can almost imagine this part of town hasn't changed since 2005, when it wasn't just the music scene that was beautiful. Yeah, I don't want to romanticize much. Try not to be nostalgic about it. But there always was kind of, in every street there would be some action. That's Fırat Yücel, he's a documentary director, film critic and longtime editor of the Turkish cinema magazine <i>Altyazı</i> and he remembers a lot of the action was around cinema, or rather cinemas, which Beyoglu was known for since way back. It was four theaters and like there were some old theaters, really large, you know, 1000 people, 2000 people, and you could walk in and, you know, magical atmosphere would be waiting for you. And my generation also had the chance to see a few of these theaters, and one of them was Emek movie theater. Emek theater was built in 1924 off Beyoglu main drag, Istiklal Street. It was a grand Art Nouveau palace that by the 00s screened everything from Hollywood blockbusters to international arthouse stuff. For film obsessed college kids like Fırat it was their home and hive. Because you could just walk out of the theater and then in seconds you would be out in the streets. And because many people smoke in Turkey, they're probably like hundreds, maybe sometimes thousands of people out in the street, you know, talking about films, you know, and even, for example, our magazine was, we thought of this magazine in one of the screenings in Emek movie theater, we were like 7 or 8 people who went to this film and we said, like, let's make a movie magazine. They were not alone. There was also a wave of thinking about films, for example. There were like, not just us, but there was a few film magazines. So imagine an atmosphere where I mean, for political cinema magazines and for mainstream cinema magazines and one in between. We were trying to compromise. And there was plenty of Turkish cinema for all those critics and all those magazines to dissect, thanks to the rise of a new political party that was going to define 21st century Turkey and its movies. It was called the AKP, the Justice and Development Party headed by this man Recep Erdoğan. When he and the party came to power in 2002 it seemed like a new day. So in the early stages they started to support filmmakers, so they were a bit more liberal in the first...- When they started?- Yeah, when they started. And therefore the filmmakers had a bit of liberty to talk about issues that weren't easy to be talked about before, because in the 90s it was quite a difficult country. Yeah, in the 90s, the government was embroiled in an armed conflict with Kurdish guerrillas who wanted to break away from Turkey and form their own country. So the authorities cracked down hard on any kind of dissent. A lot of which was labeled terrorism. But in 2000, the government had a liberal agenda, and they were trying to also find peace with the Kurdish forces. So the country was a bit more relaxed, let's say. So people could talk about taboos. And some filmmakers definitely did. This is the opening scene of a movie called <i>Autumn</i>, released in 2008. Through the hazy, blown out black and white of what looks like closed circuit video footage, we hear a police negotiator telling political prisoners on a hunger strike to give themselves up. Then we meet one of those prisoners, years later. Prison doctor tells him he's got a terminal lung disease made worse by hunger strikes. So he's released and heads to his misty hometown in the mountains to live out what's left of his life. It was the debut film by a guy named Özcan Alper. Hi, Sir. Nice to meet you. I'm very honored to talk to you. And one morning, over some strong Turkish coffee, I met up with him at his Istanbul apartment to talk to him about it. If you were a university student in the 90s, it was easy to go to jail. I mean, you could be arrested for protesting at a university or a rally, and you would be jailed for 10 to 12 years. I actually had a few friends like that. My film was inspired by my own student years. That's how it was. But for that brief moment in the 00s, you could not only make movies about the fallout from the 90s crackdown, the Erdoğan government would help fund them, and audiences were hungry to see them. We were happier. I really thought that Turkey would be more democratic, more free. After I made <i>Autumn</i>, I was going to a lot of different cities, 7 or 800 people in every screening. I would be speaking after one screening while another screening was starting down the hall. I would do that 4 or 5 times a day, talking to 3 or 4000 people a day. It was a very big thing. I could feel how powerful it was to make a film. So could folks like Fırat Yücel watching movies like this at the Emek and hang in with that huge community of cinephiles at the many festivals the theater hosted. These new directors, this generation was much more political than the previous generation. We were quite impressed by these films and during the festivals it was like really packed and really a great atmosphere of talking, dreaming, talking about films. Yeah, it was quite special. And then everything changed. Yeah, right around the time I first visited Istanbul in 2011, when to tourists like me, everything seemed open and moving forward behind the scenes, the AKP was actually starting to shift into reverse. Early on, the party thought that to establish a powerful government, they wouldn't want artists, intellectuals and other people in the cultural field to oppose them. So they made sure to seem nice to us. But once the government felt secure in its power, they started drawing strict red lines for what was allowed in movies. They talked less and less with filmmakers, and cinema was seen as less important. Yeah, I remember like, they would say we don't need the liberals anymore. Like, that was the rhetorics they start to use. And to be fair, in the early 2010s governments in Turkey's part of the world had a pretty good reason to fear liberals because mass uprisings were breaking out against repressive regimes all over the Middle East, from Tunisia to Turkey's next door neighbor, Syria and beyond.<i>Protests in Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan. Egyptians filled Tahrir Square in</i><i>the center of Cairo, protesting for weeks.</i> So in that period, Occupy Wall Street happened and the Arab Spring was also happening. So I think the government was quite paranoid. You know? The Arab Spring is happening. Regimes are getting potentially toppled and they're "Like, oh, maybe all this freedom and liberalism isn't so great." Yes, exactly. Erdoğan's policies got less secular humanist and more religious, nationalist and conservative. Tensions were back between the AKP and Kurdish guerrillas. The party got more intolerant of the LGBTQ community. People making movies about this stuff got less funding and more hassled, and things finally blew up when the government came to bulldoze a piece of Istanbul cinema history. This is that street I mentioned earlier, Istiklal, Beyoglu's main drag. It's a humming pedestrian strip where the only vehicles allowed are streetcars. Istiklal used to be lined with independent shops. Today, not as much. Istanbul is now maybe one of the towns in which there are the most shopping malls in, they're everywhere. They're inside the city. They're in the center. They're in the peripheries, maybe even much more than they have in Abu Dhabi or somewhere. You know, it's crazy. In Istanbul, they are everywhere there. Firat says these malls started popping up in the late 00s as part of the government's urban renewal plan. The goal was supposedly to rebuild parts of the city so they could withstand an earthquake. Instead... They just, you know, made an urban transformation for the rich. And on Istiklal that meant a bunch of beloved old communal spaces would have to be razed, including the Emek Cinema. The locals didn't let it go quietly. This is footage from a 2016 documentary called <i>Audience Emancipated</i>. It's all about the weeks of demonstrations that sprung up to save the Emek. There are thousands of people chanting stretching far down Istiklal. Obviously driven by something more than trying to preserve a nice piece of architecture."We see this as a place of struggle" says one of them."We dream of a place not just to watch movies, but to fearlessly come together." They're chanting "May this mall collapse. May Erdoğan be buried under it." Close your eyes and it doesn't feel that much different than the Arab Spring protests, a vibe that probably wasn't lost on Erdoğan's government. Eventually, they shut it all down. In our last demonstration, the police attacked us. All of us was watered. I don't know, it's called water cannon. Yeah, high pressure water cannon. High pressure water cannon. And also tear gas. And next to me is an old film director, Erden Kıral. Probably he was 70 years old or something, but he came to stand with us because he thought if he's there, it would be easy to negotiate with the police. But it didn't happen. The Emek was partially demolished in 2013 and replaced by, yes, a mall. You can still see traces of its former grandeur, like the marble passage leading into the building. And pieces of the theater ended up in what's now an event space on an upper floor. I tried to get in to see it, but a security guard told my guide, Ilayda Kulaksizoglu, that it was closed off that day. Now they're shooting like a YouTube show today, so we can't even go up because they're setting up cameras. But he said that like, even it's hard to get a ticket to any event that's here, he said. Exclusive, not accessible by the common civilian. Yeah, really sad to see what it has turned into. But other classic cinemas are hanging on and open to everyone, and so are the city's filmmakers. I head underground in Istanbul and try to find hope on a hopeless day. That's coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. All right, everybody, MUBI is the film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers. We've always got something new for you to discover. And this week I got two picks for you to discover. First of them being a movie I told you about just a few minutes ago, director Fatih Akin's documentary<i>Crossing the Bridge</i>. It's showing on MUBI right now, almost globally, and it's one of those movies that just makes you feel cooler and cooler while you watch it. Akin follows Einsturzende Neubauten bassist Alexander Hacke on a journey through Istanbul's music scene in the heady days of the early 00s. Not only will it help you to Turkish music that will blow your mind. Just wait till you hear this rapper called Ceza's hyperspeed flow. It's also kind of alternative tour of Istanbul. So if you're into music or travel, this is a must see. And then for a more modern look at the city with a very different kind of vibe we've also got Levan Akin's acclaimed 2024 movie <i>Crossing</i>. The story of a Georgian woman who comes to Istanbul to find her transgender niece, who she learns is somewhere in town. As you may have guessed from the episode so far, Erdoğan's government is not friendly to the trans community. But this movie finds a lot of tenderness in a very tough situation. Highly recommend. That is <i>Crossing the Bridge</i> and <i>Crossing</i>, two movies, very similar titles that should cut down on your search time, and you can watch them both right now, almost worldwide on MUBI. Just head to mubi.com to subscribe and start watching. As usual, you will find all the links and info you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. So in April 2013, when the theater protest got crushed, Özcan Alper was there. Since then, he has seen the Erdoğan government crack down on other protest movements, literally change the constitution to stay in power, deny public funds to political movies and sometimes keep them from being shown. So when I spoke to him at his apartment, I had to ask why things aren't even worse for artists like him. You know, like you're making political films in a government that doesn't want, clearly doesn't want political expression to happen. So how do you get those films made at all? How are you not shut down? It's not like an open dictatorship. You have to understand, this isn't Russia where 80% of people support Putin. Here it's 50 or maybe even 60% against Erdoğan. And despite all the anti-democratic measures, there are strong student movements, feminist movements, labor unions and democratic organizations. There is such a power of democracy in Turkey. So, yes, Erdoğan is pushing hard on everything right now, but they are in no position to forbid us from shooting a movie. Now, if that sounds like a hopeful take on the situation. Really I saw a lot of hope in Istanbul. Like the next day I was in a taxi to the Asia side of town, and when my cabbie wasn't listening super intently to sports radio, he told me he was sure Erdoğan would lose the next presidential election to a guy everyone knew was going to announce his candidacy any minute. The popular mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu. By the way, the cabbie also complimented me on my naturally full head of hair, because apparently a lot of American men come to Istanbul for hair replacement surgery. I guess it's a local specialty. We both found that hilarious. And when he dropped me off in a neighborhood called Kadikoy to meet my guide, Ilayda... Things turned even sunnier. This is a cinema in Kadikoy. It is cunningly named, yes, the Kadikoy Cinema, built in 1964. On the overhead sound system while we bought tickets. The Who's Roger Daltrey sang uplifting about not getting fooled again. Then we descended the stairs down to a cozy underground concession space and then into the 318 seat screening room. Which blew my freaking mind. Wow! This is... rad! We are standing in the back of one of the coolest theaters I've ever been in. This is really cool. This looks like, I don't know, it feels like it could be the movie theater on the starship Nostromo from <i>Alien</i> or something. Yeah, most cinemas are boxes. The Kadikoy is more like a wide, oval shaped tube. The cream colored walls and ceiling have these almost organic folds, forming a tunnel of concentric rings leading down to the screen. It feels half geometric, half animal. I guess it's almost like being inside the mouth of a whale looking out. It's like the gills of a whale or a fish going down the sides of the wall. Very modernist. How do I describe this? It's like ribs. That's how I would describe it. It's kind of like you're inside a rib cage and... It reminds me of, like, a caterpillar. Like or like a worm. Like layers. So it's either like being inside a whale or inside a rib cage or inside a caterpillar. Exactly. And the fact that we can't decide is why this is so cool. You know, something curious? All the seats have little plates with names on them. Like after Covid, this theater was having a hard time standing, so people donated just to support the theater. So they put up little plates with the names of people that donated them. So every seat has a name. I hope when each of those people come to the cinema, they have a guaranteed seat. And it's that one. Yeah, well. Well, probably.- I just want to walk down to the front.- Yeah. This definitely looks like it was made in 1964. It is so modernist and so kind of forward thinking and futuristic. You can, there's like a real sense of optimism in this place. When we left the theater, I took that optimistic vibe with me. Mall multiplexes have displaced a lot of old school cinemas in town, but the ones that survive are pretty wonderful. And so is the audience that's kept them and Turkish filmmakers going through rough times. In fact, a half hour later, as the skies opened up with rain, I almost literally bumped into a guy I happened to know as one of the best stories ever about the passion of Turkish filmgoers. Director Emin Alper. On the spot we made a plan to meet the next day for an interview about it. And there we were, me and one of the best filmmakers in the country, chatting under umbrellas while he was on his way to grab some groceries. As I headed off to catch a ferry back across the Bosphorus to my hotel, I thought, this place is magic. And then the next day, this happened.

It's a noon, like 12: 26:57

15 p.m. On Wednesday, March 19th. And I was just in my hotel room and a colleague just texted me and, told me that the, mayor of Istanbul, who's one of the big opposition leaders in the country, just got detained by the government. And I'm going to look at video. There's live video on Reuters online. And there's live video of a protest that's forming, I guess, outside Istanbul police headquarters. Something like that. I don't know if you can hear the fear in my voice there, but as I watch the crowd grow and heard their anger grow, it was pretty clear that jailing Mayor İmamoğlu, remember the guy everyone knew was going to run against Erdoğan for president, it wasn't just another little crack in Turkish democracy. It was a chasm opening up. For a second, I wondered if I should get the hell out of the country, like, immediately. And if that's what I was thinking, what about the guy who I was about to interview? My name is Emin Alper. I'm a filmmaker. I just finished my fifth film. I met up with Emin Alper that day at the Cinematheque in Kadikoy, where he's artistic director. I started by asking him to tell me the story. I'd originally hoped to end this episode with the fallout from his 2022 movie,<i>Burning Days.</i> That's a political thriller about small town corruption and homophobia. At Cannes it competed for the Queer Palme d'Or. And that's when things went crazy. For the production of the film we got public fund from the Ministry of Culture, and then we did the film after the film was shown as a candidate for Queer Palme in Cannes the ministry said they wanted the money back. Yeah, the ministry claimed Alper had made a different, I guess, gayer movie than the script they'd originally been pitched. Now they wanted to claw back the funding. A million Turkish lira. It turned out to be great publicity. After Cannes, already, people were really curious about the film because of this Queer Palme issue. Since the LGBTI issue became a taboo for the government, and then when the ministry wanted the money back, people really started running to the cinemas. There was big lines. I mean, it was amazing for me to see such scenes because we are not used to see such queues, such lines in front of cinemas, and many people said that they couldn't find tickets and moreover, people, just to show solidarity, started buying 10 tickets, 20 tickets. People would buy like 20 tickets and then give them out to friends, or even if they couldn't, at least the tickets were bought and you'd have money to pay back the government. They bought 20 tickets and they declared it on social media. I mean, it became, it turned into a kind of protest. Social protest.<i>Burning Days</i> became one of the biggest art house hits in the history of the country. Emin paid back the ministry with money to spare. Now you see what I mean about Turkish audiences. Since that fracas, Emin says he doesn't get public funds from the government anymore. For him, it's all private investors and co-production deals with countries like Germany. But the movies get made and they've been seen in his home country. Now who knows? Compared to Iran, we have some freedoms, we had some freedoms. But I don't know what will happen from today on. A candidate for presidency was arrested and now Turkey had a big step forward to more authoritarian regime, maybe a full fledged dictatorship. We will see in the near future. So from now on, our future, all the future of the artists and filmmakers are bleaker. I mean, probably I will have more difficulty in even showing my films in cinemas. Now a new phase is starting for us, so we don't know what will happen. Why now? Why did this happen now? I mean, everyone is asking this question. Nobody knows. But for my opinion, it is somehow related with Trump's election. I mean, after Trump is elected, probably Erdoğan and the government thought that they will have a free hand in Turkey. I mean, nobody knows the exact reason except Erdoğan. Yeah, I don't know where to go from that, man. That's pretty bleak. I came here kind of to tell a story about, you know, a country where there were a lot of restrictions and yet great films were still being made. You don't think that that will happen going forward? I mean, of course it's getting more and more difficult. I mean, as I told you, in Iran the conditions are much worse. But still, Iran has a great cinema. Probably some people still continue to shoot films. And we will see what will happen. That night it was a weird trip back to the hotel. I knew from Reuters that outside the jail where İmamoğlu was being held, thousands were protesting, with hundreds arrested. But on my walk to the dock and then on the ferry, there was just resigned quiet. People watching the news on their phones in a daze or just staring out the window, watching the city lights slip by on shore while a busker sitting cross-legged on the floor put the vibe to music. Back in the glamorous old world lobby of the Grand Hotel de Londres, same thing. The only hint anything had changed was when I asked the front desk guy for the day's WiFi password. Do you have an internet code or anything? Yes, there is code, but the internet is very weak because the situation.- The government situation. Yeah.- Oh... That's what he called it,"the government situation". I actually don't know if that's why the internet was weak. It was kind of weak to begin with. Up in my room, went out on the balcony. Same view over the Bosphorus. But this time it was impossible to pretend things haven't changed since 2005. As of this recording, Istanbul's mayor is still in jail, by the way, on alleged corruption charges. And now the regime's jailing more and more of his allies. Meanwhile, in the States, my President has threatened to do the same thing to some of his opposition. It all makes me think about something I'd asked Emin about the harrowing ending of <i>Burning Days</i>. In it, the two heroes, a public prosecutor and a journalist, have tried to expose their town's corrupt elite. Who among other crimes, had been illegally draining the water supply, opening up huge crater-like sinkholes all over town. Now the pair of them are being chased through the desert night by a pack of these howling, laughing elites and their local thugs. They can't wait to kill these guys. But suddenly they have to screech to a stop because in the darkness, they've run right up to the edge of a sinkhole. They shout to each other, terrified. They're pretty sure at least one of them has fallen in. And then they go silent when, in the light of their flashlights, they see the two guys they've been chasing, alive, somehow standing quietly on the far side of the sinkhole. And the people who have been chasing them suddenly feel humbled or scared or something. And it's a really stunning moment, and I'm wondering what you think that means. What is being said there? I mean, for me, it is important that they were stopped by a sinkhole which is created by themselves, actually, by their irresponsible policies. And there are two sides on the edge of the sinkholes. And I just wanted to show that there's a kind of hope. For the time being, now everything is hanging on the edge, but the fight will continue, I just wanted to say this. I was standing in a hotel at the edge of the Bosphorus, a gap between continents crisscrossed with bridges and ferries. There are lots of ways to get to either side. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this season. It has been an honor telling the stories of these amazing cities and their movies. If you're new to the show, skip back a few episodes from my tours through Ireland, Amsterdam, Mexico City, and the strange country of Los Angeles. And follow us wherever you listen so you don't miss an episode. Next time we launch an all new season about some lighter fare just in time for the holidays, we are going to be talking about food on film, starting with the story of maybe the greatest movie about fine dining ever, and how researching it wasn't always easy on the stomach. It's horrible, it's wonderful, and it's horrible because when you've eaten to the point where you're nauseous and you think, I can't have any more, you're about halfway through. Cooking up Pixar's <i>Ratatouille</i> featuring that guy, the film's producer, Brad Lewis. Follow us so you don't miss it. While you're at it, if you love the show, do leave us a five star review and tell the world about us on social media. Let folks know this isn't your standard movie chat show. And if you got questions, comments, or if you want to tell me how to properly pronounce Turkish names, I did my best, people, email us at podcast@mubi.com

And now let's roll credits: 36:49

this episode was written and hosted by me, Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Kat Kowalczyk is our assistant producer. Christian Koons edited it. Michelle Lanz is our story editor. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick. Special thanks this week to everyone at MUBI Istanbul, especially Cem Altınsaray and Ilayda Kulaksizoglu. The show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And finally to watch the best in cinema subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening, go watch the movies and travel tip for Istanbul: do buy a rare album by the Turkish folk rock legend Arif Sağ. Do not be an idiot and forget it at the Istanbul Airport food court.