Senay Aydin

Mihram is an inventive small-time trader in a provincial town in Eastern Turkey in mid 90s. He has many ideas for good business deals, but never enough capital to realise them. Since the day he has seen the antenna being put up he has decided to open a store to sell mobile phones.

Mina is jobless, lonely, and unhappy. She wants to escape to the USA and start from zero; a familiar feeling to most of us. But how? She needs money, documents and a visa. She applies to a fortune-telling café -lying that she has experience. While she reads the coffee cups of many different women, she also tries to find a way out herself. Through the shapes emerging in coffee cups, she expresses her own frustrations and desires to match with those of the customers. (IKSV)

Frequent time shifts are clumsily edited as the story of Zuhre (Senay Aydin) unfolds. A teen from a rural town in Turkey, she's fallen in love with a local boy and had the audacity to sleep with him and get pregnant. When the family finds out, they force her gentle brother Ismail (sensitive heartthrob Berk Hakman) to strangle the baby, then send him out to shoot Zuhre on her way to school.

This is a film made for a cause: To remind people of the many times that intellectuals in Turkey have been murdered since the foundation of the country and to pray that, never again, will there be murders like the slaughter of Sabahattin Ali and Hrant Dink. Moses Without Rod follows the turning points in the life of the Kurdish intellectual, Musa Anter, in a metaphorical light. Rather than by an actor, the character is symbolised with his felt hat, overcoat and wooden suitcase. (film.iksv.org)

Aylin, Frida and Lale struggle to hold on to their independence in increasingly conservative Istanbul, when their paths cross at Lale's acting courses. (imdb)