The Cut Short, Live Long film festival to feature 10 Turkish shorts online

The Yunus Emre Institute (YEE),  Turkey’s global cultural institute, works to promote the study of Turkish and foster intercultural understanding. Its first activity in 2021 is a short film festival that will be offered to audiences online because of the pandemic.

The Cut Short, Live Long Online Short Film Week is organised by London, Berlin and Washington DC Yunus Emre Institutes, featuring 13 award-winning short films. They will be screened simultaneously between January 25 to January 30, 2021 in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

This will be the first time that the institute will organise an online screening week. The films will be streamed at the yeecinema.eventive.org website especially prepared for the event. The website also contains detailed information about the films as well as trailers.

The thirteen films, three of which are international productions, will be screened at the selected  date and times, while it will be possible for film lovers to watch any film free of charge within 12 hours of its first screening.

The film week aims to bring together international audiences with the Turkish film sector which is followed with great interest overseas. The first films from the selection of innovative Turkish shorts will be ‘Stainless’ and ‘Tor’. The audience members will be able to join in the Q&A sessions of the films which will be broadcast in Turkish with English subtitles and chat with the directors.

Here are the films that will be shown as part of Cut Short, Live Long Online Film Week:

January 25, 2021: Tor (Akbank Short Film Festival Short FIlm Forum/Best Screenplay) Ayşe, an elderly woman, leads a difficult life with her grandchild. She makes a living taking care of a wealthy family’s guard dog, Tor. Tor becomes very sick one day. The family is out of town, and Ayse does everything in her power to make the dog survive.

Stainless (26th Adana Golden Cocoon Film Festival, National Student Films Competition) “Mrs. Selma decides to give one of her deceased husband’s suits to the apartment’s janitor who needs it for her son’s marriage. Noticing a stain on the jacket, Mrs. Selma struggles with her loneliness among the memories of her lost husband and tries to keep her memories ‘stainless’.”

January 26, 2021: Avarya “Embarked on a spaceship in the hope of finding a new habitable planet, the human trapped in his own ship after the robot overseer finds every single candidate planet unsuitable. Eventually, the human finds a way out, but that will only reveal a dark secret.”

Ikame (Substitute) Selim, who works as a construction worker, has a traumatic accident that will change his life completely.

January 27, 2021: G.K. “An inspector [arrives at] a prison in which the prisoners are predominantly pregnant gypsy women.”

 Interstate 8 “In the southern United States, two young women meet by chance in the back of a police car and, without saying a word, experience the injustice hovering above them.”

January 28, 2021: Dede (Grandfather) “Dede Çolak is a shepherd in Aladağ district of Adana. Because of the high number of child deaths in the village, the villagers have gone to shrines and sought different names for the children. Dede, who takes his name from the Koyun Dede Shrine, lives with the name given to him and continues his daily life … as a shepherd.”

Teselli (Consolation) “The story of people who lose their real wealth on the road to [earthly] wealth.”

January 29, 2021: Maradona's Legs “In a Palestinian village during the 1990 World Cup, Rafat and Fadel search for “Maradona’s legs” – the last missing sticker they still lack for their World Cup album. The way to this rare piece leads them further and further out of their home village.”

Servis (The School Bus) “‘The School Bus’ is about a female teacher, who has just been appointed to a village school in Anatolia. [She] decides to drive a school bus for her students but she doesn't know how to drive!”

January 30, 2021: Bir Nehir Kıyısında (At A Riverside) “While a civilian group with a woman who is about to give birth were running away from Serbian genocide to the safe zone with a [staticky] radio in their bag, with the dog barking they hear, they understand that they are not at the riverside, but at the side of another thing…”

Bitcoini Olan Rakun (Raccoon with Bitcoin) “A jammed elevator, a Raccoon and his Bitcoin. Among Flamingos, the Raccoon who lost his Bitcoin in the chaos goes after the Flamingos. Wait... What?”

Good Thanks, You? “In the aftermath of an attack, Amy is left voiceless, trapped in a whirlwind of incompetence. She must find a way to confront what has happened, in order to save what matters most to her.”